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.