House of Bamboo

House Of Bamboo came out in 1955 three years after the Japanese Peace Treaty effectively ended the occupation of Japan that began post World War II. Americans must have been familiar sight on the streets of Japanese cities still in 1955, we certainly had enough military personnel there. If you don't recognize that fact than you will be puzzled as to how a gang of Americans crooks could operate the way they do in the streets of Tokyo.

For those of you who don't recognize it screenwriter Harry Kleiner took the screenplay he wrote for the Henry Hathaway classic, The Street With No Name and set in down in post occupation Japan. Robert Ryan plays the gang leader part that Richard Widmark had. He's recruited a gang of former military misfits who spent more time in the stockade than in combat and made them into an effective heist gang. Ryan's got other interests, but his main income is from some well planned robberies.

The USA military intelligence gets involved when Ryan hijacks a train with military hardware and kills a soldier. Going undercover is Robert Stack in the Mark Stevens part.

Unlike The Street With No Name, Stack's allowed a little romance here in the person of Japanese actress Shirley Yamaguchi. In The Street With No Name it was Widmark who had the girlfriends and Stevens was strictly business. Sessue Hayakawa is also in the cast as the Japanese police inspector.

There's a gay subtext in the film with the relationship of Ryan with his number two, Cameron Mitchell. When Stack starts to take his place in the gang hierarchy, Mitchell reactions are of pure jealousy. In fact Mitchell's reactions are what sets in motion the climax of the film.

Which you know if you've seen The Street With No Name. House Of Bamboo boasts some mighty nice location shots of postwar Tokyo which looking at it you would hardly believe what a difference a decade might make. The title House Of Bamboo is the place that Ryan lives in and it's a pre-war structure typical of the Tokyo before General Doolittle inaugurated US bombing raids. Those wooden houses went up like tinder boxes. Note the more modern look Tokyo has in 1955.

The color might disqualify House Of Bamboo from the genre, but the film as the look and feel of a good noir film. Which is as good a recommendation as I can give it.

After World War II, Hollywood saw the Far East as simply a new background for familiar heroics... "House of Bamboo" was in fact a remake of a 1948 gangster melodrama called "The Street With No Name" with Richard Widmark...

An army cop (Robert Stack) with a charming widow (Shirley Yamaguchi) moves into undercover action in collaboration with the Japanese security authorities against Tokyo gangsters, and their leader Robert Ryan, an intellect mastermind racketeer, head of an impressive organization engaged in robberies, fraudulent businesses, and murder whose plots challenge the magnificent effort of the international police..

With fascinating Japanese locations and photographed in CinemaScope and Technicolor, the film depicted the wonders of Fujiyama, the extraordinary city of Tokyo and its back streets in water ways invoking mystery and intrigue...

House of Bamboo may look like a standard B crime-picture, but in amongst the noirish trappings, the somewhat forlornly straight-forward plot, the workmanlike performances, there lurks one of the few genuine portraits of post-War Japanese life ever attempted by an American filmmaker. The director, Sam Fuller, is clearly in love with Japan; his fascination with Japanese culture, art, daily ritual, suffuses House of Bamboo so completely that one almost forgets, at times, what it's supposed to be about. Its story - an undercover army cop infiltrates a group of ex-soldiers running a robbery ring in a rebuilding Tokyo - seems little more than a pretext, an excuse for Sam Fuller to indulge his Japanophilia, his fetish. But Fuller, always the pro, at least pays some attention to his story between excursions onto the Japanese street in search of background detail, local color, bits of peripheral business, and manages despite his preoccupations to deliver a satisfyingly vigorous, if slightly routine-seeming, exercise in crime melodrama.

Fuller, schooled as a journalist, had mastered the art of hard-hitting, well-paced, detail-oriented storytelling, and House of Bamboo is one of his stronger, more tightly-structured works. It's set in Japan in the years just after the war, a time when there is still a strong American military, and criminal, presence in Tokyo. Eddie Spannier (Robert Stack) has just arrived in Tokyo from the U.S., intending to hook up with his old army buddy Webber (Biff Elliot); he learns to his dismay, however, that Webber has been killed by hoodlums, leaving him twisting in the wind. Some casual thuggery at a pachinko parlor brings Spannier to the attention of Tokyo's resident American crime-boss, Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan); after screening Spannier, Dawson decides to invite the ballsy newcomer into the gang. Spannier, we soon discover, is actually an undercover army cop (he never knew Webber, isn't named Spannier) trying to track down the perpetrators of a recent train robbery which left a soldier dead. As part of his cover, Spannier recruits the dead man Webber's ex-girlfriend, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi, merely adequate), a Japanese woman, who poses as his "kimono girl."

Fuller's staging is remarkable from the first moments of the story; the train-heist is carried off with terrific economy and skill, a memorable three-tiered image of the train poised atop an overpass with Mt. Fuji looming in the background (the "real" Japan hovering over the new, American-infested one), punctuated by two grimly matter-of-fact images of the dead soldier's shoes sticking up from the snow. In Tokyo Fuller goes into Pickup on South Street mode, cluttered waterfronts, a sense of teeming life all around the action, if not the sweaty intimacy and sense of menace he brought to his Widmark-starred masterpiece. No one had a better sense of a location than Fuller, who jammed more side detail, more realistic human activity into a few frames of his under-estimated Western classic Forty Guns than exists in all of Fred Zinnemann's hopelessly limp, over-praised High Noon. A perusal of House of Bamboo uncovers such nuggets as the scene where Spannier, played by the disheveled, mainly inexpressive Robert Stack (he wears his trenchcoat like a bathrobe), happens upon a Noh theater rehearsal going on atop a roof, and a later moment where a quaint Japanese fan-dance suddenly morphs into a raucous jitterbug, the dancers ripping off their traditional attire to reveal the '50s get-ups underneath. These scenes are, of course, more than just bits of color; Fuller penetrates the surface of his melodrama by suggesting all sorts of simmering tensions, the sense of American culture bleeding into Japan, changing it maybe not for the better. This material makes up the real, underlying film, the incongruity of traditional Japanese costumes, architectural forms, performance styles finding their way into what would seem to be a standard Hollywood cops-and-robbers exercise, and the larger cultural struggle this would seem to embody. Only the scene where Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster happen upon the court of the Emperor of Mexico in Aldrich's Vera Cruz tops for aesthetic disjointedness the scene of an apparently half-wasted Stack in his comically shabby hood-just-off-the-boat get-up stumbling upon the garishly dressed and made-up Noh performers, and nearly being knocked off his feet by one of them.

It's amazing the way Fuller uses the camera, not just the fact that he conceives brilliant shots, but that he always knows how and when to use them. He has an almost Griffith-like instinct for the big moment, the expressive image: for instance; the scene where Webber lies dying on a gurney, Fuller shooting the entire thing from a wide, high angle, then slowly coming in when the interrogating officer shows him a picture of his girlfriend, at which point Fuller cuts to a devastating P.O.V., the photograph coming poignantly into focus. Another shot shows his playfulness: a Japanese guy sits at a desk, the camera pulls back, we see that the desk is actually poised atop a balcony over a frantic room where Robert Stack is being prodded by the Tokyo cops. The best moment is less acrobatic but far funnier: Spannier is trying to shake down a pachinko boss, he gets attacked from behind and thrown through a paper wall into an office where his mark, the crime-boss Sandy (played by Robert Ryan with a psychotic pleasantness, that strangely tender note in his voice contrasting his completely deranged behavior), sits balanced on a chair, waiting to greet him. There's always this touch of eccentricity in Fuller, this out-of-leftfield quality, which is what distinguishes his work from that of more predictable, generally better-publicized, unforgivably more-highly-regarded directors (Zinnemann, Kazan, Robson, et al).

At the end of the movie Robert Ryan doesn't fire more shots than he has ammunition. Look closely at the start of the pearl robbery, when the armourer is handing out weapons. Before he hands Ryan the P38 he gives him at least four spare magazines which Ryan clips to his belt.

I vacillate on whether the 20th Century Fox studio claim that HOUSE OF BAMBOO is film noir is really accurate or not. For one thing, it's in color. For another, it's shot in Cinemascope. Also given it's made in 1955, I have to think of it more like a new gas/electric car: it's a hybrid. But unlike most compact hybrids out these days, this one's a full-size truck.

There are action sequences that feel more like they belong in Frankenheimer's THE TRAIN or Sturges' THE GREAT ESCAPE than in a so called noir picture, but I'm not knocking them. They're well staged, and like the entire film, terrifically photographed. But then there is the use of silhouette and high contrast more akin to noir, and the story too feels more in that vein, although more on the sparse side; certainly not a Raymond Chandler THE BIG SLEEP kind of story! Honestly, I found it no less thin a story than Fritz Lang's THE BIG HEAT. As critical as the story is, if films were only that, I'd just be reading books. What's done visually plays a pretty big part in this format.

Speaking of the cinematography, some critics have stated the widescreen use is overkill here, but I must beg to differ. With so many modern films shot more and more like television, with only close-ups and two-shots, and barely a moment of establishing frame to see where everything is happening - and with action sequences and dance numbers shooting this way now - it was refreshing for me to see the entire frame used, with characters often at either end, and action allowed to play out wide, without fast moving camera-work to pump it up. Of course the problem is that many will view a DVD of the film now, where wide shots just look far away (unless you've got a large home theater screen). But that's not the fault of the filmmakers - Cinemascope was meant for the big screen.

When the camera does move, it's clever work. The blocking is also terrific and surprisingly fresh (or again perhaps just not used anymore and so fresh all over again to my eyes). Some say it's all too tricky, but it's far less tricky than all of the motion-control work we're used to seeing now, and often (in this film at least) more involving. Director Samuel Fuller is doing the right shots at the right time here, and that takes everything on screen up a notch.

I'm not sure why there's criticism over the location, but I found the setting in post-war Japan to be as crucial to HOUSE OF BAMBOO as post-war Vienna was to THE THIRD MAN, or for that matter Monument Valley to a John Ford western. Sometimes the setting becomes one of the characters, which when done right as it is here, can only be a plus for the picture. Fuller puts it all to good use. Perhaps it's the Hollywood techniques brought into play, but I can't think of another picture, including all of Kurosawa's work, that looks exactly like this. I'm not saying it's better, just a different take on the locations, and so enjoyable as such.

I'll make the argument that Kurosawa, for example, would film a Japan he knew, but overlooked images because he was used to them, just like I wouldn't take a picture of the Golden Gate bridge because I live 45 minutes away from it. But Fuller looks at it more like a tourist if you will, and so commits to film here things that are unique or uniquely shot. You have enough of these memorable images and you start to have a memorable film. If this were another kind of film, I might not think all those fascinating shots were of such importance. But if this is trying to be noir, then it's all about the atmosphere that the landscape and settings convey. Noir or not, it truly got me caught up in the story.

I have to admit being swayed by a great score from Leigh Harline (as conducted by none other than Lionel Newman), but that's what a good score should help to do: make a decent film good and a good film great. But I also must admit that if I just look at the pieces of this film, I would never rate it so highly. It's a case, for me at least, of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, of everything working together just right to make a solid piece of entertainment, noir or otherwise.