House of Bamboo

HOUSE OF BAMBOO   ***

Samuel Fuller

1955

IDEA:  After an American military officer in Japan is killed during a raid on an army vehicle, an ex-GI arrives in Tokyo looking for the culprits.

BLURB:  Throughout House of Bamboo, Samuel Fuller juxtaposes stodgy, stolid Americans - ex-GIs involved in a Tokyo crime syndicate - against the vibrant color and social ritual of a Japan reemerging from the rubble of World War II. In DP Joseph MacDonald’s dazzling, masterfully composed CinemaScope frames, the men’s gray coats and fedoras cut sharp, incongruous lines across a milieu abounding with kabuki performances, fan dances, and women in bright kimonos. It’s an expression of blustery men trudging through a place where they don’t belong, which is to say, a metonymy of American occupation and cultural imperialism in postwar Japan. As a Hollywood film, House of Bamboo is unavoidably bound up in this very process, and Fuller is able to have his cake and eat it too by having his hero be an ex-GI just like the antagonists over whom he triumphs, reinscribing virtue as the prevailing American character. Still, the film’s Western gaze is complicated and tempered by its genuinely lovely images of Japan and its people, which are far less exoticized than one would expect from a Hollywood film of the era. Rather, they veridically index the peculiar, inchoate meetings of tradition and modernity transforming the Japanese culture and landscape, for better or worse. The forceful melding of East and West comes to a head in a Hitchcockian finale high atop a revolving amusement park ride, on which American tyranny is a recurring view.

For Me and My Gal

FOR ME AND MY GAL   **1/2

Busby Berkeley

1942

IDEA:  Vaudeville stars Jo and Harry fall for each other during the onset of World War I, but when Harry receives his draft notice their personal and professional partnership is put in jeopardy.

BLURB:  Even by the standards of the more middling Golden Age Hollywood musicals, which are surely more abundant than the exceptional ones, For Me and My Gal doesn’t inspire much excitement. Berkeley’s trademark large-scale dance choreography is nowhere to be found, while Gene Kelly, in his screen debut, is afforded scarce opportunity to show off the virtuosic footwork for which he would soon become renowned. If one adjusts their attitude toward the film, understanding it as more of a romantic melodrama with some music than a musical with some romance, For Me and My Gal delivers a degree of satisfaction, albeit on still fairly routine terms. Berkeley puts his troubled lovers, played by Kelly and Judy Garland in their first of three film pairings, through a familiar, sentimental romance-torn-by-war scenario. The war threatens not only their love and courtship, but, in the fashion of a backstage musical, their work as performers. How will anyone survive without show business? They won’t and can’t, the film suggests, as the need for uplift in hard times is manifested as a patriotic demand for mass entertainment. Hilariously, For Me and My Gal substitutes World War I for the (then) ongoing World War II, flouting all the obvious geopolitical differences for the direct purpose of morale-boosting propaganda. Against the clunky, the silly, and the trite, Kelly and Garland remind us of the simple power of convincing onscreen chemistry.