House of Bamboo (1955)

Film: House of Bamboo (1955)

Stars: Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi, Cameron Mitchell, Sessue Hayakawa

Director: Samuel Fuller

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Diversity in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to the upper echelons of stardom, has never been equitable.  You could make an argument that this is getting better (it is), but it's also nowhere near equitable.  You might think that diversity, though, is a straight line, that it's always getting better.  That isn't the case, though.  While in the 1970's & 80's, Asian actors were virtually nonexistent in lead roles, in the 1950's and early 1960's, Hollywood made a point of giving lead roles to Asian actors in studio films with some regularity.  Actors like Nancy Kwan & James Shigeta became proper leading stars, getting high-billing starting in the late 1950's and throughout the 1960's, marking the first time that Asian actors had been given this distinction since Anna May Wong & Sessue Hayakawa in the 1930's.  One other star during this era, whose leading lady career just immediately preceded Shigeta & Kwan's, was Shirley Yamaguchi, the star of today's noir House of Bamboo.

(Spoilers Ahead) A few years after World War II, a train guarded by Americans & the Japanese that is carrying a large amount of guns & ammunition is hijacked and an American soldier is killed.  When another soldier is killed with the same gun from the hijacking, police find amongst his possessions a letter from ex-felon Eddie Spanier (Stack), the only clue that the soldier gives as to his killer other than also stating that he's secretly married to a Japanese woman Mariko (Yamaguchi).  Our story then largely shifts to Eddie & Mariko's perspective, with the two united in trying to figure out what happened to Webber, largely through Eddie infiltrating himself into the criminal organization of Sandy Dawson (Ryan), and eventually in a twist revealing himself to not be an ex-con, but instead a member of the US military hired to take down Dawson's operation.

The movie's plot is, like many noirs of this era, probably slightly too decorative-there's too much going on to really work perfectly (noirs got needlessly complicated in the years that followed movies that could play complicated plots like Laura and The Third Man, though Bamboo handles this better than most by having some solid twists), and Stack is not my favorite (he's not remotely the actor that Ryan is, and despite the billing, Stack is decidedly the lead here).  But it's a gorgeously-shot movie, one of the most beautiful color noirs I've ever seen.  It's not only a case where it looks great in sharp Technicolor, but it also employs wide shots in a way that I haven't seen in noir very often.  There's a chase sequence at the end that works perfectly because you don't just see Ryan & Stack standing off in a way only one of them can come back from, but you see the entire standoff from a longshot.  It's creative, and even though this is a good movie once you can get past Stack's charisma deficiency, I'd recommend it much more highly just because of this attribute.

Yamaguchi is also good, giving her role a bit of desperation that I liked-without her husband, she doesn't know whom to trust, but is still a woman with secrets.  It reads a bit like the inverse of a traditional femme fatale-she's still dangerous, but because of those around her, not because she's bringing the danger herself.  This would arguably be the high point in Yamaguchi's Hollywood career.  The actress, who appeared in some Japanese propoganda films during World War II, was nearly killed in China for being a "Chinese National" in the wake of the war (she frequently portrayed a Chinese person in these films, making people think that she was not Japanese and thus a traitor, despite her being Japanese by birth), but her parents' rescued her from firing squad after they produced her birth certificate.  She established herself in Hollywood in the 1950's with House of Bamboo (amongst other films), but retired from film acting in 1958 and eventually became a member of the Japanese parliament.

Previous Films in the Series: Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Killers, The Big Sleep, Daisy Kenyon, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Woman on the Beach, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, The Asphalt Jungle, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, The Hitch-Hiker, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat