“I don’t wanna kill no more!” The third act of Kinji Fukasaku’s Hakuchu no buraikan (US: High Noon for Gangsters) depicts criminals of various races throwing bombs and shooting up each other in an abandoned, US-occupied, Japanese village as if acting out a coda to the world war that had so recently decimated the Land of the Rising Sun. Hitomi Nakahara plays the half black, half Japanese, second-generation prostitute Hanako, whose kidnapping by “woman-crazed darky” Tom Twain (Isaac Saxson) sparked the carnage. Much like Helen of Troy in Homer’s war, however, Masako’s disappearance is merely a symptom of a greater conflict, in this case the double-crossing, back-stabbing, and attempted killing of desperate thieves — one Japanese, one Korean, one white American, one black American — in the wake of a bank truck heist led by gangster Miyahara (Tetsurô Tanba). While Susumu Saji’s standard heist-and-aftermath script has been done far more successfully in other noirs, director Fukasaku infuses the film with an emotional and visual chaos that keeps the story thumping with momentum (Hoshijuima’s camera tilts back and forth and almost upside down at times during the most frenetic scenes). In the end, any of the characters’ redemptive qualities are too little too late to reject the blanket of moral depravity that suffocates a beaten, battered nation.