House of Bamboo

 

1955, d.  Samuel Fuller (The Big Red One) - CriterionChannel

Hollywood always seems so insistent on remaking classics, usually to lessening effect. It's hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice. So why not spend more time and effort on reworking the noble failures, to take a film with a good concept, but flawed execution, and make a better work out of it?

House of Bamboo is such an intriguing but ultimately inept production that would be served well if remade today with a grittier sensibility and proper follow through on the dominoes that were set up, but never actually included as part of the chain.

I had some serious reservations about a mid50's American-made trans-Pacific crime/suspense flick, but somehow it skates through without being overtly racist. Sexist, yeah, but surprisingly not outwardly racist. It's possible that they may have faked some aspects of Japanese culture figuring a dumb North American audience would never know, but I'm dumb North American audience, and, well, I don't know. Kinda seems to pass the sniff test though, doesn't smell outwardly funky.

What is sadly funky, not in the cool way, is the awful narration (sounds like one of the guys who made a living at narrating grade school film strips about science or agriculture) that top ends the film. It's mostly put there to calm any panicky 1950's North American viewers made immediately uncomfortable with the unfamiliar surroundings of Japan by chiming in and explaining where they are and what is happening and who's who for the first 10 minutes. 

This film is about an undercover military officer who infiltrates a murderous gang of American bandits looting, robbing, and heisting, but also becomes involved romantically with a dead gang member's Japanese wife, in a go-nowhere romantic subplot that, by all conventions of traditional cinematic crime narratives, should have involved her being in some form of peril, and at the film's resolution having to decide to stay in Japan or go with our hero Unsolved Mysteries, to America. Neither of these things happen. The third act pretty much forgets she exists, very much to its detriment.

The big boss of the crime gang is the worst crime boss this side of an 80's cartoon he's Cobra Commander or Skeletor-level inept. He's constantly defying his own rules, and overlooking the most obvious clues, just to keep our hero, Unsolved Mysteries, around, when he should just be super suspicious all the time. The final act finds him setting up a brilliant last-minute plan to kill our hero, Unsolved Mysteries, only to have it backfire on him so spectacularly all he can really do is go on a shooting rampage at a carnival with a video game gun that never runs out of bullets. What's your plan buddy? 

There's was a pretty good set up for some serious intensity when our hero, Unsolved Mysteries, asks the wife to deliver a message for him to his handler, only for her to be spied by gang member Bones McCoy, and the end result is...nothing. No stakes. This movie seems entirely too worried about anyone's blood pressure rising so it never even tries. But it's all there, ready for someone to make a legit thriller out of. Or is this what Tokyo Vice is based off of? I haven't seen it.