La maison de bambou

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.

It is 1954 in Tokyo and American soldiers and local forces are working together to protect shipments of ammunition moving around the country. Whenever a group of men rob one such shipment and kill one of the US guards, the US army get involved in the investigation along with the local police. The trail is cold until a different turns sour and an injured criminal is finished off by his own gang using the same gun that killed the US guard. The man dies of course and turns out to be a former US GI; days later the dead man's friend (Eddie Spanier) turns up in Tokyo and, finding his friend dead and no hope of work turns to the protection racket, bringing him to the attention of the same gang his friend was in – a gang run by former US soldier Sandy Dawson. Eddie gets into the gang thanks to his criminal record – a record falsified by the army in order to get him on the inside and take the gang down.

The daytime cable stations are littered with crime b-movies from the 1950's etc and they all pretty much try to stay to the same formula, what made me sit to watch this one though was the presence of Sam Fuller in the director's chair. The plot here is a typical crime thriller regardless of the Oriental setting and we have a man infiltrating a tough gang to bring it down. As a story it kinda goes where you expect it to and has some elements that don't really work but overall it is tough and gritty enough to entertain for the most part. The Oriental setting appears to be only a novelty and it isn't used to any great effect, with only Japanese stereotypes making it onto the screen and no real sense of place – this could have been Chicago for all the difference the location makes to the story. The script makes up for this though by throwing in plenty of tough dialogue for the cast to work with and it is impressive in a typical b-movie fashion; meanwhile Fuller does frame a good shot and add a tense edge to the telling, even if he doesn't use his Japanese cast that well.

Stack and Ryan were another big draw to me; maybe not known as the best actors in the world but they can do gritty well enough for this film to work. Stack is good value as he does suggest angry layers to his character even if we are not allowed to see them – certainly some sense of "justice" seems to drive him to take such risks for little pay and his demeanour backs this up. Ryan is much more relaxed and he suits the gang leader role, nicely cracking a bit towards the end. Using Yamaguchi seemed a bold move but really she is as American as you could get without using a white actress in gap jeans; her character is a little interesting but is ignored in favour of the tougher male dynamics within the film. The support cast are OK and buoy up the tough aspect of the film but really it is Stack and Ryan who own the film and it is best when they share tough scenes together.

Overall this is a standard b-movie that is worth seeing on that level while also having enough else going for it to make it an enjoyable film. Fuller's direction may not make great use of his exotic location but he still directs well whether it be tough talk on sound stages or the brutal shoot out on the fairground, high above the Tokyo streets. Stack and Ryan play off each other well and the dialogue is tough and crisp, making it an enjoyable piece of b-movie entertainment.

In the mid-1950s, using the same screenwriter (Harry Kleiner) and cinematographer (Joe MacDonald) as in the original, the unpredictable Samuel Fuller remade 1948's The Street With No Name as House of Bamboo. For starters, he set in not in anonymous Center City but in post-war Japan -- the first American movie filmed there since the Second World War.

Even in color, Fuller's Tokyo has a grey, slummy look to it, punctuated only by women in blood-red kimonos shuffling through the Ginza. It's an open city where vice flourishes and where ex-G.I. Robert Ryan runs a string of pachinko parlors as a cover for a crime ring. Military investigators and Japanese police tumble to these activities when a U.S. guard dies during a train robbery. And thus enters Robert Stack, sent by the army to infiltrate the gang and solve the murder.

Fuller deals his cards from a deck shuffled differently from his predecessor, William Keighley (who directed Street). It's not clear at the outset who Stack is, keeping us off-balance for a while; there's also a cross-cultural love affair between Stack and Shirley Yamaguchi, the widow of a slain gang member -- Ryan's standing orders are to leave no wounded to tell tales. A twisted erotic charge links Ryan to his pursuer; hinted at in the original, here it deepens the dynamic of Ryan's jealous obsession with his "ichiban," or favorite lieutenants.(There are enough sliding rice-paper screens to fill all of Douglas Sirk's movies with metaphorical barriers, too.)

Far from merely capitalizing on the 50s fad for shooting on locations around the newly opened globe, Fuller seems to construct another metaphor -- for the Occupation of Japan as exploitative, parasitic. Luckily he doesn't press this too far, and House of Bamboo stands as an offbeat, deftly made crime thriller from late in the noir cycle -- albeit with Mount Fujiyama squatting serenely in the background.

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.

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...