FILM OF THE WEEK: House of Bamboo

FILM OF THE WEEK: House of Bamboo

by Vadim Rizov

The best?or least most characteristically forceful?Samuel Fuller movies veer excitedly from one violent moment and camera movement to the next, like someone justifiably punching you in the face. 1955's House of Bamboo is a calmer production. Fuller novices shouldn't start here: for a introduction to the two-fisted director's earlier work, try on the sleazy Cold War noir Pickup on South Street (made two films before this) or 1957's Forty Guns, a widescreen Western that often accelerates to warp speed. House of Bamboo has patches of standard-issue narrative tissue to get through, and the camera's less mobile and impulsive than usual. Compared with, say, 1952's Park Row, in which Fuller tracks so fast the camera gets wobbly out of sheer urgency (speed trumps thought), Bamboo is more tableaux-bound.

Robert Stack is Eddie Spanier, an American who arrives in Tokyo and promptly starts shaking down pachinko parlor managers to get some seed money. Clad in an ill-fitting raincoat and seemingly sweating alcohol out of his pores, Eddie marches in with minimal English, demands to see the "#1 boss" and shakes him vigorously. Doing this twice lands him in hot water with Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), who's already established his own crime base and doesn't want competition from any other ex-pats. Impressed by Eddie's sheer loutish verve, Sandy adds him to his gang of ex-GI's who still think like military men: erratic behavior is "battle fatigue" and anyone wounded during a heist is shot to avoid giving out information during interrogations. In the one successful robbery shown, the team uses smoke bombs to cover their escape, the landscape looking nothing so much as a firebombed village.

The exteriors of House of Bamboo were shot on location, making it the first Hollywood production shot in Japan. (An annotation of the locales and inaccuracies can be found here.) Leigh Harline's score is used sparingly to underline the film's documentary appeal. Rendered in expensive, vibrant Cinemascope that wasn't yet a realistic option for the financially embattled Japanese film industry, Bamboo is as sharp a sketch of pre-neon Tokyo as it is a bitter noir. At one point, Eddie rudely marches through a kabuki rehearsal, an excuse for Fuller to respectfully capture the stylized actors and ignore the unpleasant protagonist.

Eddie turns out to be an undercover agent of sorts, though he's just as rigid and unappealing on the side of the law as he is as a low-level thug. "My attitude towards the Stack character?towards any character in any picture I do?depends on the question, 'Is he doing an unnecessary job?'" Fuller noted in an interview during the '70s. "He is. So I can portray him as the lowest sort of double-crosser." Like Richard Widmark in Pickup (a pickpocket who does the right thing out of venal and vengeful motives, rather than for the sake of American values), Eddie's commitment to justice is less convincing than the moments where he resorts to violence as communication.

Cops and robbers are the main characters, but the fallout of their violence on civilians leaves more of an impact. During the climactic shoot-out, Sandy faces off against everyone else, with the mob boss perched on a gigantic wooden wheel in an amusement park. The area has to be quickly cleared by the police to hunt him down, and in keeping with the military allusions, the crowd looks to be dispersing in avoidance of an air raid. Up top, the camera shakes, with the leads clearly on top of a real and mildly dangerous structure revolving on a tilted axis, their bullets making the vicinity unsafe for all others until they're done. House of Bamboo looks back in anger, showing how violence displaces the innocent once again.

[The House of Bamboo screens at NYC's Film Forum from Aug. 26 ? Sep. 1.]

Posted by ahillis at August 23, 2011 11:49 AM

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