House of Bamboo (1955)

User Rating:

6.8/10   

Director:

Samuel Fuller

Writers:

Harry Kleiner (written by)
Samuel Fuller (additional dialogue)

Release Date:

1 July 1955 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Film-Noir | Crime

Plot:

Planted in a Tokyo crime syndicate, a U.S. Army Investigator attempts to probe the coinciding death of a fellow Army official.

Plot Keywords:

Train | Beautiful Woman | Remake | Racial

Cast

Robert Ryan	...	Sandy Dawson
Robert Stack	...	Eddie Kenner
Shirley Yamaguchi	...	Mariko
Cameron Mitchell	...	Griff
Brad Dexter	...	Capt. Hanson
Sessue Hayakawa	...	Inspector Kito
Biff Elliot	...	Webber
Sandro Giglio	...	Ceram
Elko Hanabusa	...	Japanese Screaming Woman

Runtime:

102 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.55 : 1

Sound Mix:

4-Track Stereo (Western Electric Recording)

Certification:

USA:Approved (certificate #17450) | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

Tokyo, Japan

Company:

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Trivia:

The first Hollywood film (other than travelogues) to be shot on location in Japan.

Goofs:

Miscellaneous: Sandy Dawson apparently carries only one handgun, but fires dozens of bullets in the final chase scene without having a chance to grab another weapon or reload.

Quotes:

Sandy Dawson: Who are you working for?
Eddie Kenner: [posing as Eddie Spanier] Spanier.
Sandy Dawson: Who's Spanier?
Eddie Kenner: Me.
Sandy Dawson: Who else you working for?
Eddie Kenner: Eddie.

Movie Connections:

Edited into Shock Corridor (1963)

Soundtrack:

House of Bamboo

Noir meets Noh: Fuller's remake of Street With No Name

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.