The House of Bamboo (1955)
Screenplay by Harry Kleiner and Samuel Fuller.
Directed by Samuel Fuller.
Samuel Fuller partly remakes cowriter Kleiner’s film noir The Street With No Name as his second CinemaScope feature, making it a sort of apologia to Japan at the same time.
After text tells us the film was shot entirely in Tokyo and Yokohama, a somewhat confusing scene of a train heist that finds one of the criminals wounded and left for dead by his men, we see that man, Webber, questioned by police before he dies in the hospital, not giving up his outfit. The police find a letter for Webber’s friend, Eddie, inviting him to Tokyo.
Eddie turns out to be Robert Stack, who talks with Webber’s widow, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi) and doesn’t show much sympathy for her loss, more concerned that he’s out of a business opportunity. He tries shaking down some shop and club owners for protection, which soon runs him afoul of racketeer Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), who gets him hauled in by the cops on a dummy charge in order to use his connections to find out who Eddie is. His file says he’s got a lengthy rap sheet as well as a dishonorable discharge, so Sandy puts him to work in his gang. Only Eddie is actually an Army investigator trying to pin Sandy for murder.
It’s a bit of a sluggish setup, though enjoyable to see post-war Tokyo in widescreen splendor, already a bustling if not-so-neon metropolis. And as befits CinemaScope, even for a noir, most of the scenes are set in daylight.
Mariko initially puts Eddie up in her place, which results in one scene that shows this has caused her to be ostracized in her community, shamed either for taking up with an American, or cohabitating with a man she’s not married to, or both, but this is all we really see of Japanese people relating to each other, aside from the police, who act just like American cops.
Sandy has a rule that if one of his crew is injured on a job, they are to be killed right then and there, so as not to be caught and forced to sing like a canary. On his first job, a kind of factory heist by boat, with lots of smoke pots to cover the escape, Eddie is in fact winged, but Sandy calls off his man from shooting him, and insists Eddie and Mariko stay in his house, less out of largesse than a general suspicious nature, though it’s never really clear why he violates his rules for Eddie, as the taciturn Stack never makes much of an effort to ingratiate himself. In fact, it’s a little strange how Stack, a seasoned actor at this point and back in lead roles with this film (and coming off a hit with John Wayne, The High and the Mighty) doesn’t have much dialogue, no close-ups, and seems content to let Ryan dominate their scenes.
Ryan is, of course, the king of playing not just mean, sadistic villains, but often ones with a racist streak, and when Mariko is followed and seen meeting with a man (actually an officer working with Eddie on taking Sandy down), he takes it for a romantic rendez-vous and throws her through a paper screen door for cheating on Eddie.
Later, Sandy calls off the big job, sensing the cops, and ends up killing longtime crew member Griff, thinking he had ratted on him. Griff had been left out of the job after showing his temper and insecurity for Sandy favoring Eddie over him. Soon enough, Sandy finds out Eddie’s real identity and purpose, and takes him, along with Charlie (Star Trek’s DeForrest Kelley), to rip off a pearl jeweler, but really to set Eddie up for the cops to kill him.
It seems like an elegant plan--let the cops come in, guns blazing, and Sandy and Charlie gone, and they won’t be wanted for Eddie’s murder--but the execution is laughable, and Charlie is shot, with Sandy trapped on the crowded Ginza (a fairly narrow shopping/tourist area with only one real exit, not unlike the Santa Monica Pier), resulting in a shootout on top of a giant globe-type thing, with Eddie conveniently conscious, cleared of wrongdoing, and given a gun, so he and not the dozens of Japanese police can kill Sandy. As the credits roll, there’s a wide shot of Eddie, now in uniform, walking with Mariko, in love and perhaps married.
A pretty good climax, and some very nice photography overall (the house of bamboo is Sandy’s and it’s attractive, though mostly not actually bamboo), but the lack of close-ups and dialogue for Stack makes him harder to relate to, and his early act of being a thug isn’t really undone much by any scenes that show his actual decency or kindness, or the romance between him and Mariko, which, as with a lot of films of the ‘40s and ‘50s, seems to occur almost offscreen. Eddie enjoys when Mariko makes him a poached egg on toast, but that’s hardly the basis for a relationship. Ryan is terrific, though the dialogue is perhaps a bit beholden to the ‘40s and not really reflective of 1955, not that one was expecting Beat poetry. There seems to be more effort at showing that Americans and Japanese can work together, and emphasizing how Western Tokyo was already becoming. Actually, thinking about this and the breakfast scene, the subtext seems to be that while Japan is beautiful and its people respectable, the good news is that WWII has resulted in them modeling themselves after the victors, the U.S., and that any changes in culture are going to be a one-way street.
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