Espionnage à Tokyo

It could have been good. An attractive cast .Great location photography. Exotic setting . BUT somehow this film is dull dull dull. I'm not sure of the reason. The dialogue is so tedious and stiffly delivered that individual scenes seem to take a century. Then there's the grotesque over acting of, the usually reliable, Edmund O'Brien, who is here reduced to a terrible Bogart impersonation. Like a vampire . Like a Bela Lugosi, jowly vampire, he sucks the life out of every scene he's in. Joan Collins, a beautiful woman, is photographed to look like Queen Elizabeth the second, and Robert Wagner can't project beyond his wavy hair.

Stop Over Tokyo! Very Nice Movie! The Photography is unforgettable! Kohko is great!

Based on of all things a Mr. Moto story, Stopover Tokyo has US Intelligence Agent Robert Wagner foiling a plot to assassinate the American High Commissioner at a ceremony devoted to eternal peace. Along the way Wagner gets a chance to romance Joan Collins working as a ticket agent for British Airlines. Definitely mixing business with pleasure.

Another agent Ken Scott has staked his claim on Collins before Wagner got there and that does cause some friction between them. Nevertheless Wagner and Scott do get the job done.

Leading the opposition is Edmond O'Brien who has the guise of an American businessman, but is secretly a Communist spy. The 'High Commissioner is Larry Keating and his wife is Sarah Selby who is more concerned for her husband's safety than he is.

We did not have a High Commissioner in Japan at that time, we had an Ambassador as our occupation was formally over. We did have a High Commissioner for the Ryukyu Islands chief among them being Okinawa which was our's by UN Mandate. They were not returned to Japan until the Seventies.

Stopover Tokyo's biggest asset is the location cinematography done in Japan, particularly in Kyoto the ancestral home of the Emperors. Kyoto was untouched by American bombing and is one of the few places that retains a traditional Japanese look from before World War II. As the city is sacred in Shinto religion the Japanese located no war industries in or near it and we obliged by not bombing same.

For all of that Stopover Tokyo is a routine action/adventure Cold War story. It might have helped if 20th Century Fox had gotten Peter Lorre to do Mr. Moto in the film.

What the previous commenter says about the movie is basically true--this is simply an escapist picture-postcard movie with a bad, clumsy script. The action, what there is of it, makes no particular sense and the romance is dull and pointless. Some lines of dialogue, like the one about "no paragraph about Welshmen" (used twice!) are actually stupid. However, the commenter also went over the top himself when discussing the movie's condescension. Robert Wagner doesn't say "Ah, Madame Butterfly" to a waitress. She's not a waitress, she's a famous Japanese diva that he met on the flight to Japan, and it's explained in the first scene that she's known for playing Butterfly. So there's nothing condescending or inappropriate about it, but this detail is so clumsily placed (like everything else) that I can't blame the viewer for misunderstanding it.

It's a 1950s Cinemascope film with Robert Wagner, and it's our first chance to see him in a modern-dress picture since the excellent A Kiss Before Dying. The decor and locations are similarly eye-worthy to Kiss, but the photography is toned down and some sets made to look shopworn to suggest a recovering Japan, at which the film succeeds. The clothes and automobiles more than compensate.

Stopover Tokyo is memorable for being the one that Joan Collins was contractually obligated to appear in after the studio's promise that she would work with Roberto Rossellini fell through. Was anyone expecting genius from a film adapted from a Mr. Moto novel to satisfy another contractual obligation? Just enjoy the ride, its a post-war film as aesthetically satisfying as The Crimson Kimono, without the burden of pretentious auteur direction. (They thought so little of it that they let the screenwriter direct.)

If you want a better Wagner film in Cinemascope, see A Kiss Before Dying. If you want a better Joan Collins role, see Turn the Key Softly. Otherwise, stop blaming everything on Edmond O'Brien.