House of Bamboo

Shot in sweeping CinemaScope and vivid DeLuxe color, Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo is the best of a surprisingly small handful of American noirs set in the Far East. Loosely based on Mark Stevens’ character in The Street With No Name (1948), Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack) is a U.S. military police officer who goes undercover to infiltrate a racketeering gang of disgruntled American ex-servicemen who just held up a military train in the mountains, killing a U.S. Army guard. Suspicious of Spanier at first, ruthless gang leader Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan, whose entrance is handled with skillful surprise) ultimately recruits him to serve as his right hand man — much to the displeasure of current sidekick Griff (Cameron Mitchell) — and involves him in heists while Spanier secretly reports back to American and Japanese investigators. Shirley Yamaguchi plays Mariko, the widow of a gang member whom Spanier uses for information and cover and to whom he quickly takes an extracurricular liking. Fuller makes glorious use of the exotic location (Mount Fuji towers majestically in the background) and interiors (shojis shimmer with blue light and silhouettes) without concealing the American postwar influences: in one party scene, the traditional Japanese kabuki instantaneously transforms into American swing. The film boasts one extraordinarily composed scene after another, from Spanier’s initial chase and confrontation with Mariko to the climax on a rotating building balcony during a carnival. The most memorable, the brutal and beautiful slaying of a stool pigeon in a bathtub followed by the killer’s conversation with the corpse, has the kind of raw power we’d come to find years later in the films of Coppola and Scorsese.