House Of Bamboo

1. Bamboo House / Vilela Florez
2. Is 'hell Dogs

“What about Japan?” asked Zanuck. “Would you like to shoot a picture there?” “Holy mackerel, Darryl, now you’re talking!” When offered the opportunity to film an entire movie in Japan, (Fox would be the first major American studio to do so) Samuel Fuller jumped at the opportunity and the result is House of Bamboo, a lushly photographed, cold-as-ice film noir like no other. 

Japan, 1954. A military train is robbed of its cargo by a ruthless gang of professionals led by the sadistic, but brilliant, Sandy Dawson (the incomparable Robert Ryan). Weeks later, one of the thieves lies dying in a Tokyo hospital, shot by his own accomplices. Recently released convict Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack) arrives in Tokyo, and joins up with the gang, impressing Sandy so much he quickly becomes his “ichiban” (number one man), greatly displeasing the former favourite, Griff (Cameron Mitchell). But is Eddie all he seems?

Also starring the beautiful Shirley Yamaguchi, House of Bamboo is a stunning, brutal masterpiece, featuring incredible widescreen photography by Joe MacDonald, and hard-boiled dialogue and action that is the Fuller trademark.

No Peace Of Mind

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This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. We also use Facebook pixel to provide social media features and to analyse traffic to the site.'s introductory image, snow-capped and serene, a travelogue shot; then, a few moments later, the same mountain is viewed from the vantage point ofthescene of a crime by a ground-level camera, framed through the outstretched feet of a murdered soldier: Samuel Fuller in Japan, like tabloid ink sprayed on kakejiku scrolls. Tokyo in 1955 is noticeably the same one filmed concurrently by Ozu and Naruse, but it's also something of an open city, the war a fresh memory and the American Occupation fresher still, with glimpses of the wharfside shanties—anxious worlds barely afloat—Nagisa Oshima would explore in

Bamboo House / Vilela Florez

. Into it stomps agent of mystery Robert Stack, who's such a truculent Yank that, rather than taking in the rooftop rehearsal of a Noh troupe or the awe-inspiring tracking shot that captures the CinemaScope sprawl brimming with movement, he merely barks Does anybody speak a little English? Fuller, on the other hand, is alert to the crossroads of tradition and modernity in which this combat film (disguised as an exotic

) is set, pointedly balancing Stack's tentative romance with a widowed kimono gal (Shirley Yamaguchi) with his submerged romance with the coolly vicious head of a racketeering gang of ex-GIs (the great Robert Ryan). Like the stately fan dance that suddenly segues into a jitterbugging shindig, the film's portrait of a ruthless, businesslike crime system is a wicked fusion of America and Japan that's contrasted with the protagonist's redemptive interracial affair, and an example of the iconoclastic filmmaker's ribald eye for cinematic collisions of characters and forms. A flurry of pulp vibrancy later mined by the Nikkatsu sagas of Seijun Suzuki and Koreyoshi Kurahara (with aspects further expanded in Fuller's

), it's a dazzling collection of screens brought down and lifted up and, above all, torn open—as befits an auteur-agitator forever bent on slamming together viewer and action, the most startling moment has the main character being slugged through a wall of rice paper and landing at the feet of the audience of gangsters watching from the other side.

Is 'hell Dogs

Notebook is a daily, international film publication. Our mission is to guide film lovers searching, lost or adrift in an overwhelming sea of content. We offer text, images, sounds and video as critical maps, passways and illuminations to the worlds of contemporary and classic film. Notebook is a publication.

Notebook is a daily, international film publication. Our mission is to guide film lovers searching, lost or adrift in an overwhelming sea of content. We offer text, images, sounds and video as critical maps, passways and illuminations to the worlds of contemporary and classic film. Notebook is a publication.