House of Bamboo (1955)

“We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense.”

                                                                                                - Sam Fuller

The cinema of Sam Fuller is not for the passive viewer. His films crash like a calloused fist into your face and then insist you keep your senses about you. He is the consummate American film director. His themes and characters are conversely noble and barbaric, poetic and crass, much like the very soul of this nation.

It is not so much cynicism that leads Fuller to this end, but an appreciation of duality.

Fuller’s style and attitude toward his stories possess that dichotomy. There is a hero and betrayer in us all. His no nonsense approach to plot and structure is nuanced by compositions and camera work of a very deliberate, self-conscience nature.

This is perhaps why he is dismissed as a hubristic mouth-breather by some in the film community and lauded as the quintessential American auteur by others. With either view, it is undeniable that Sam Fuller has provided some of the most vulgar, honest, and coarse films ever to come out of mainstream American cinema. He was a darling of the French New Wave and its offshoot publication Cahiers du Cinema, as well as championed by directors of the German New Wave of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog.

He has run the gamut from epic masterpiece, The Big Red One (1980) to trashy melodrama, The Naked Kiss (1964), from lurid exploitation with White Dog (1982) to the biting social commentary of Shock Corridor (1963) all with the craftiness of a journalist (his former occupation) and, at times, a sleazy tabloid sensationalist.

His cigar chomping, gruff voiced persona puts him in league with other rough-hewn mavericks like John Ford and Sam Peckinpah and literary cousins Ernest Hemingway and Charles Bukowski. Fuller’s is a cinema of men - where ethos, energy, and action trump emotion. Most often, plot devices (like females) are regarded as unfortunate necessities. Auteur theory enthusiast Andrew Sarris once dubbed Fuller “an authentic American primitive.”

In 1955, 20^th Century Fox boss Daryl F. Zanuck approached Fuller with an offer to remake the studio’s successful Street with No Name (1948). Keeping with a formula that had worked splendidly with the studio’s musicals, Zanuck felt the story could be reworked and set in a more exotic locale. The gritty, urban crime pictures of the 1940s (later to be known as film noir) had begun to lose their appeal with audiences by the mid ‘50s. The genre was tapped out. Zanuck’s ploy was to enliven the story by setting it in Japan. It had been ten years since World War II ended and only three since U.S. occupation had ceased on the island. Fuller, entranced by Asian culture, eagerly agreed. He doctored Harry Kleiner’s (Fallen Angel) original script for Street to assimilate the new setting and, with his crew, headed for the Land of the Rising Sun. It would be the first American feature film to be shot in post World War II Japan.

Fuller’s small budgets and short shooting schedules endeared him to most studios and producers. His experience with deadlines in journalism and his military training (he was a decorated soldier) ensured this economy. These factors also played a strong role in his developing style. He never cared for excessive takes and loved the improvisational moments and “happy accidents” of shooting on the quick. The unpolished scenes lent a greater sense of reality, which, along with his newspaper background, added a documentary feel to his pictures. House of Bamboo even begins with a deadpan narrative that tells us “This film was photographed in Tokyo, Yokohama and the Japanese countryside”. So much for the fourth wall.

This brevity of production also formed his visual style. His shots are jagged, his editing, a sequential jarring of the eye, challenging the viewer to keep up with the action. It is typical for Fuller to cut from low angle to high, wide angle to close-up, then reverse the whole process, jumble it and start again, all in one scene.

His compositions, however, are remarkably rich and seem meticulously planned, despite the production limitations. His frames bristle with peripheral action, sound, dialogue, and colors. His mise-en-scene and editing were very unconventional compared to his contemporaries. Specifically, when looking back to the mid to late ‘50s at the attempts of directors to incorporate Fox’s new Cinemascope technology, Fuller’s use of it in Bamboo is the most inventive of all.    

The film begins with beautiful expository long shots of the Japanese countryside. Mount Fuji looms heavy and enormous in the background. Workers dot the fields and the smoke from a supply train billows into the cool, blue sky. On a snowy bridge, a gang suddenly robs the train. Fuller uses a series of disjointed angles to portray the chaos. There is a lot of gunplay. A U.S. soldier is killed in the confusion. One of the Japanese workers screams in close-up. In another long shot, she runs to the village for help. The camera cuts to ground level, using the dead soldier’s boots as a framing device for another shot of Mount Fuji.

One of the gang members is wounded in the attack. Fuller uses a tilted overhead shot of the operating table as U.S. Army personnel grill the dying man for clues on the gang. They show him a photo of his Japanese wife (interracial relationships play a key role in the film) and he dies begging them to leave her alone.

Enter Eddie Kenner (played emotionlessly by Robert Stack), who hunts down the widow Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), posing as an ex-army friend of her husband. He gains her trust and she helps him go undercover and infiltrate the gang.

Fuller keeps Kenner’s motives a secret for the first thirty minutes of the film. Stack portrays Eddie as the quintessential “Ugly American”. He boorishly saunters into pachinko parlors, slaps around the managers, and demands protection money. Lumbering around the rebuilding Tokyo in an old overcoat and hat (intentional leftovers from a noir wardrobe), he is verbally abusive to every Japanese person he encounters (especially the women) and becomes irate that no one speaks English well. This causes his loudness and bluster to increase. It not only works well in developing his undercover credentials but also acts as Fuller’s commentary on the vulgar cultural intrusions that the U.S. was making in Japan since the war’s end.

These intrusions come to a metaphorical head with the gang, former American military personnel (all discharged dishonorably) who run an underground syndicate of Pachinko parlors as a front for their robbery endeavors. The boss is Sandy Dawson (the ever-menacing Robert Ryan) who runs the gang like a paramilitary outfit. Sandy takes notice of Eddie’s brutish tactics and arranges for an innovative meeting with the small-timer. The innovation consists of Sandy’s henchman roughing up Eddie and tossing him through a rice paper screen, where he lands at the feet of the boss. It is a terrific and unexpected reveal.

Sandy takes an immediate liking to Eddie (the homosexual overtones are tangible) and grooms him to become his right hand man. This causes all sorts of distrust, infighting, and jealousy with Sandy’s former number two, Griff (Cameron Mitchell). Eddie is doing his job well.

What is hilarious about the homoerotic subtext is that Ryan was absolutely in on the joke and Stack remained clueless. Ryan plays certain scenes with the innuendo of a baseball bat to the head and Stack just stares at him, puzzled. If they are to consummate their love, Eddie needs to get a bit hipper.

The rest of the film plays out as typical crime melodrama with Fuller’s usual twists on conventions. Our stoic hero, Eddie, becomes more and more feminized by both Sandy’s sexual interest in him and Mirako’s constant pampering. Fuller turns the racism of the Americans on its ear by showing the Japanese locals shunning Mirako for her involvement with a westerner.

The director also fills his frames with images of Japanese culture (public baths, Kabuki theater troupes, pagodas, shrines, gaming parlors, street vendors, etc.), utilizes the unique interiors of the Japanese home for dramatic and action purposes,  and even sets the climactic shootout on the roof of a department store featuring a children’s amusement park. 

Ironically, House of Bamboo has been criticized for its overtly “American” sensibility. Detractors point out the unlikelihood of an American gang, who speaks no Japanese, to take over a crime syndicate in Tokyo from under the nose of the Yakuza (who is absent in the film) or be able to pull off daring robberies, out in the open, in the middle of the day.  

In the world of Sam Fuller, where greed, perfidy, and brutality are ways of life, that is petty nitpicking.

It could also be argued, with a glance at the current Iraq situation, that a combination of U.S. Military presence, corrupt political leadership, a racist attitude toward the locals, and a few avaricious businessmen can lead to a lot of criminality indeed.