Casa de Bambu

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...

This movie has similarities to THE THIRD MAN in that both involve someone (an American) living comfortably in an alien culture as a parasitic gangster in a war ravaged country just after WW2 with a good guy (another American) in pursuit. In narrow cinematic terms, in terms of the story as other reviewers point out, its not a great movie. There is though very much more of interest to it than that.

In historical terms we see Tokyo as it then was in 1954. We see the Japanese as officials, as policemen, as gangsters, the good, the bad, in their natural habitat rather than simply as massed cruel soldiery or suicidal pilots. It has elements of a travelogue with a fascinating glimpse behind the rice paper screen. The movie, which has really handsome colour photography, starts with the curious beauty of a snow covered landscape with Mount Fuji in the background and a murderous attack on a military supply train in the foreground. The ending too shares the same deliberate disjunction - dark violent justice dealt out in a sunny family setting - Top of the World, Ma?

Robert Stack here very much pre-figures his role as Eliot Ness in THE UNTOUCHABLES - dogged and brave in the fight against organised crime. Robert Ryan, tall impeccably elegant and seemingly entirely at ease as a violent mobster in a very foreign land.

Much criticism seems carping and misses the point. As was said of the dog that could walk upright - the question was not so much that he couldn't do it perfectly but that he could do it at all. This was a unique bold movie embedded in post WW2 underworld Japan really striving for authenticity. Not the customary montage of tourist sites and hotel interiors with a cast looking as if they'd gone no further than that themselves.

Were there American gangsters in this way in post war Japan? Presumably so if CATCH 22 is any guide. In this movie however the morality is old-fashioned, certain and unambiguous. By 1970 CATCH 22 served up satire and moral ambiguity to the Hippy generation.

A fascinating little bit of history as well as being a very watchable movie

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.

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.

I had fun through most of House of Bamboo, Samuel Fuller's second widescreen, first filmed out-of-the-US picture, even as I knew at the end it wasn't too special. It's got some memorable scenes with the two male leads, the kind of seemingly hard-boiled actors that probably wouldn't shake much if you hit them with some punches. And the whole plot line of the American crime ring in Tokyo in 1955 gives enough room for Fuller to realize some of the acting, camera and editing possibilities at his big-studio disposal. Robert Stack is in one of his best early parts as a would-be big crook undercover for the US army who infiltrates Robert Ryan's 'organization', where its tightly run to the point where Ryan's ready and willing to kill his own if wounded in the moment of crime. On top of this, Stack falls for a 'kimono' who was married to a late-member of the crime team. But will the deceiving remain?

The majority of the film works under the crime parts of the story, where in some scenes (maybe or maybe not in the new cinema-scope style) Fuller just keeps the camera on the scene without cutting. This room and space and time does create the right tension- and occasional humor- in the right spots. And Ryan is also up to task as the cold antagonist. Yet if there are parts of the film that are lesser than the bulk of it I'd say it would be with the 'Kimono' Mauriko, played by Shirley Yamaguchi. Her part in the story is mandatory to be sure, but it is just so-so in the writing and delivery, as far as such a formula would allow. And it is probably more of the writer's fault and even on Yamaguchi's end, arguably, than Fuller's. There are also some typical, dated bits of 'lost in translation' moments that may be part of the deal in making the very first Hollywood movie filmed entirely in Tokyo- they're 50/50 of doing the job for the entertaining parts of the picture.

Nonetheless, House of Bamboo is a more than decent example of what can be done with other material from one setting into another (both from a 40's noir, Street with No Name, and from US to Japan). There is also a sweet, if not greatly paced, climax in a wheel machine on a roof. It's gritty machismo with fun, with enough pure Fuller to suffice the studio standards.