Dis­cov­er this ear­ly Samuel Fuller noir set in Tokyo’s crim­i­nal underworld

Loca­tion is every­thing. In 1948, William Keigh­ley made the mono­chrome The Street with No Name, a film noir full of infil­tra­tion and impos­ture, and set it on the Skid Row of a fic­tion­al Cen­ter City (in fact Los Ange­les). Sev­en years lat­er, Samuel Fuller reworked this mate­r­i­al with its orig­i­nal writer Har­ry Klein­er for a remake of sorts, House of Bam­boo, but a deci­sion to relo­cate events to post­war, post-Occu­pa­tion Japan, and to shoot there too, would make all the dif­fer­ence, intro­duc­ing a new geopo­lit­i­cal dimen­sion to all the duplic­i­tous plot­ting. Fuller also brought this noir out of the past into a new future by film­ing in Cin­e­maS­cope and DeLuxe Colour.

The inter­play between past and future is key to House of Bam­boo. It opens in 1954 with a train rob­bery, against the back­drop of Mount Fuji. That train, trans­port­ing arms and artillery, is being guard­ed by both a Japan­ese police­man and a US Army Sergeant, in a nation that has recent­ly regained its sov­er­eign­ty and is now work­ing close­ly with its for­mer ene­my and occu­pi­er. Yet the for­ward tra­jec­to­ry of this loco­mo­tive is stopped by a gang of ex-US sol­diers turned crim­i­nals, who rep­re­sent a vio­lent and dis­rup­tive rem­nant of the past, and are so back­ward that they would rather kill their own wound­ed than risk hav­ing them tak­en alive. As the Amer­i­can Sergeant is shot dead in the heist, Amer­i­can forces are invit­ed to join the local police inves­ti­ga­tion, and to help restore peace to the region.

Around this time, anoth­er ex-sol­dier and ex-con, Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack), arrives in Japan look­ing for his for­mer com­rade turned local gang mem­ber Web­ber (Biff Elliot), who recent­ly died in cap­tiv­i­ty from injuries inflict­ed by his fel­low gang­sters. Eddie, with his flam­boy­ant swag­ger (evi­dent­ly the result of a war wound), his gruff laconi­cism and his readi­ness to action, is as hard-boiled as they come.

His fear­less, sin­gle-hand­ed attempts to shake down local pachinko par­lours for pro­tec­tion mon­ey quick­ly attracts the atten­tion of the gang’s leader, Sandy Daw­son (Robert Ryan), who recog­nis­es in this delin­quent sol­dier a man in his own image. Eddie shacks up with Webber’s wid­ow Mariko (Shirley Yam­aguchi), and is soon on his way to dis­plac­ing the impetu­ous Griff (Cameron Mitchell) as Sandy’s ichiban or ​‘num­ber one’.

Eddie, how­ev­er, is not real­ly Eddie but an impos­tor, infil­trat­ing the gang to bring it down, at great per­son­al risk of get­ting killed at any point by either cops or rob­bers. This dou­ble agency makes great demands on Stack as an actor, requir­ing that he in effect play two char­ac­ters, one cold and crim­i­nal, the oth­er car­ing and just. It also allows him to embody the con­flicts and con­tra­dic­tions of a nation still haunt­ed by its vio­lent past while work­ing through a new dis­pen­sa­tion of democ­ra­cy and civil­ian life.

Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Joseph MacDonald’s wide lens frames the coex­is­tence of Japan’s old­er tra­di­tions and emerg­ing moder­ni­ty, even as Eddie’s evolv­ing rela­tion­ship with Mariko tracks the same shift in Amer­i­can-Japan­ese rela­tions that can be observed in the new friend­ly coop­er­a­tion between local police and for­eign military.

The cli­max at a rooftop amuse­ment park sees the fugi­tive Sandy cir­cling a mod­el of the globe and tak­ing dead­ly pot­shots, first at the police pur­su­ing him, and then at ran­dom strangers. He is ele­vat­ed, like a malev­o­lent god, set­ting him­self above and beyond earth­ly affairs. Yet he is also an arrest­ed adult on a fun ride, reduced to the lev­el of the actu­al chil­dren below – the inher­i­tors of Japan’s future whose lives he is now endangering.

If Sandy embod­ies a world stuck in its own past and unable to move on, a world that feeds on itself and its own, then ​‘Eddie’ pro­tects and enables a dif­fer­ent course – one of recon­struc­tion and rap­proche­ment. Fuller’s lean, taut thriller comes in a sim­i­lar spir­it, as one of the first Amer­i­can stu­dio fea­tures to be shot in Japan, with the full coop­er­a­tion of both the US mil­i­tary and the Japan­ese police. This is a much big­ger, very dif­fer­ent world from the small one that Sandy orbits, and his end brings an opti­mistic kind of clo­sure to decades of aggres­sion between Japan and America.

House of Bam­boo is avail­able on Blu-ray from Eure­ka! Video’s Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma Series from 7 December.