Sam Fuller is the mastermind behind this 1955 mash-up of
noir mystery, gangster, military, and romance movie elements. With a genius for
injecting soft-boiled humanity into hard-boiled genres, the director delights
in confounding our expectations from the broad points of who our characters are
to the smaller details, such as when a traditional Japanese dance suddenly
mutates into a wild jitterbug.
Fuller also luxuriates in ravishing locations and sets and
the bright colors that undermine the noir clichés that all but melt away by the
Hitchcockian climax atop a rotating globe high over Tokyo. While Fuller usually
worked in black & white during this period (though he’d just come off the
color Hell and High Water), the
locations and sets in House of Bamboo
are simply too vibrant and detailed to reduce to monochrome. Star Robert Stack
brings similar vibrancy and detail to a character who enters the film as a
cliché-spouting and rather charmless thug, and ends up taking unexpected turns
in keeping with so many of the film’s other elements.
Twilight Time’s new blu-ray really does justice to the
DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope breadth of House
of Bamboo. Presentation is natural and devoid of a single blemish. This is
a beautiful picture. Bonuses include Twilight Time’s standard isolated film
score and commentary track with Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman, as well as an
additional commentary from filmmaker and noir historian Alain Silver and his frequent
collaborator James Ursini. Units are limited to 3,000, and you can purchase one
on Twilight Time's official site here.
