DIRECTOR: Samuel Fuller
PRODUCER: Buddy Adler
PRODUCTION CO: 20th Century Fox/Criterion Pictures
SCREENPLAY: Samuel Fuller, Harry Kleiner
PHOTOGRAPHY: Joseph MacDonald
EDITOR: James B Clark
MUSIC: ​Leigh Harline
WITH: 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)

REVIEW

“Some of Samuel Fuller’s great war films are actually postwar films — classic entries in the film-noir genre that highlight the trauma, the fear, and the corruption caused by combat, conquest, and occupation. In House of Bamboo, from 1955, Fuller sets the action in Japan — it was the first postwar Hollywood movie to be shot on location there — and centers the drama on a crime ring of American veterans who are hoping to cash in on the turmoil of the country’s reconstruction. Robert Ryan plays the head of the ring, who runs his outfit with a military discipline and whose tentacular access to valuable information reaches to the core of the American government. Robert Stack, tense and square-jawed, plays another hardboiled American, who gets beaten up for competing with the ring but ends up joining it — and finding more profit in informing on it than in participating in it.
 
Filming in CinemaScope and Technicolor, Fuller offers a virtual travelogue of Tokyo street life that teems with gangland insiders ready to jump at orders from their American boss. Meanwhile, lingering resentments fuel local hostility toward Japanese women who become romantically involved with the American occupiers; one such woman, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), proves crucial to the crisscrossing plotlines, and the gangsters’ reference to her not by name but as 'the kimono' shows the contempt in which such women were held by the occupiers as well. The exposure of racial prejudice is among Fuller’s lifelong themes; so is the depiction of violence with a luridly lyrical flair… Far from endorsing such violence, Fuller displays, to the extent that Hollywood allowed at the time, its pathological allure — but he didn’t stint on the allure that fed the pathology.”

– Richard Brody, New Yorker

“A classic gangster beat-down of considerable interest to fans of Japanese cinema as well”

– jbspins.com

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Auckland      
Monday, 17 April, 6.15pm 

CLASSIC & CULT CINEMA selection >>