Japanese director Hideo Gosha is mostly known for his chambara (sword fighting) films like Sword of the Beast, Goyokin, and Tenchu, but, he also directed crime films. His earliest crime film was the well-crafted Cash Calls Hell (1966) starring the striking Tatsuya Nakadai as a recently released prisoner hired to kill three men for his prison cellmate. Howveer, it becomes a different type of film when he has a change of heart once he has come in contact with the first victim who is killed by other gangsters. This is Japanese film noir at its finest, Nakadai finds himself at grimy docks, industrial warehouses, junkyards, prison yards, deserted amusement parks, alleys, strip clubs and cheap bars to get at the truth of the situation where gangsters from Hong Kong are completing his job for him. Along the way he acquires the orphan of one of the men who was killed and comes face to face with the woman who was the wife and mother of two people he killed in a car accident that sent him to prison. Gosha excels with the expressionist black and white cinematography in the gritty urban landscape. The film even ends in an unpredictable and surprising manner.
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