House of Bamboo

This all started with a column in a New Yorker issue in August, Critic's Notebook: Trouble in Mind. To wit: The most exciting spasm of violence in Samuel Fuller's wide-screen, color-splashed 1955 film noir, "House of Bamboo", is one that doesn't happen. It involves an American crime boss (Robert Ryan) who runs a syndicate in Tokyo, a hard-nosed expat (Robert Stack) who has recently joined the gang and arouses suspicion, and a billiard ball. In the first Hollywood feature to be shot on location in postwar Japan, Fuller transports to an exoticized setting his usual concern: the conflict between the moral repugnance of violence and its visual and visceral thrills. The movie is famous for its gunplay - a bathtub shooting that's sordidly funny, a police ambush of silhouettes seen through the rice paper screen, and a climactic shootout on a flying-saucer-like carousel perched on a rooftop high above the city. But for one terrifying moment, captured in a single tense shot and embodied in Ryan's seething, panterish self-control, Fuller makes his fierce sympathies ambiguous even as he imagines gore beyond what Hollywood mores allowed - and hints that he enjoyed it. The writer was Richard Brody.

In watching the commentary provided by two critics, several names jumped out:

The street with no name

Pickup on South Street

I shot Jesse James

Cinemascope

The film itself was interesting. It begins with a narration, which itself is unusual: a film, not a documentary, begins as if it were a documentary. It is post-WW2 Japan. A supply train chugs along, and stops for a peasant struggling to move his oxen off the tracks. In quick order, it turns out he is not a peasant, for he chokes the engineer who comes out to yell at him. Other train personnel are similarly mugged. And the lone US soldier is shot, and killed. A peasant woman hears the shot, rushes over, sees the dead body, and screams into the camera.

Robert Stack lands in Yokohama, takes a taxi to Tokyo, and chases after Mariko, the sweetheart of his buddy (who in prior shots is seen on an operating table being interrogated by US Army personnel, who find the picture of Mariko in his wallet; he confesses that they were married, but that it is a secret). Stack's character (Spanier) begins to intimidate pachinko managers, shaking them down for protection money. At the second joint he is ambushed by men working for Ryan's character (Sandy). He is thrown through rice paper screens, and beat up a bit. In short order, he joins the gang, and becomes a favorite of the boss. Such favoritism rankles Sandy's long-standing second-in-command, and tension is born, to manifest itself in various ways (including the above-mentioned bathtub scene).