Popular reviews

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★ 5

  Action! - Three Auteurs: The Narrative Tabloids Of Samuel Fuller

  Exactly twelve years before the release of "You Only Live Twice," our director Samuel Fuller brought us a spy adventure that brought together elements of thriller and film noir, with a character that is never quite as enthralling as Agent 007, but Robert Stack gives it his best shot, and the end result is an entertaining and very gritty take on the genre, which brings nothing new, but tries to recapture much of the (problematic) charm of the 30s and 40s.

  As noted above, Stack does an outstanding job capturing the gruff, macho but romantic characteristics of the men of the time, especially secret agents and the like. There's something…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 17

  Beware of spoilers.

  As Sandy Dawson, the king of House of Bamboo's criminal court, Robert Ryan is an intentionally dulled presence (something that extends even to his wardrobe, the clothes he buys for the men around him, and the place he lives), a flawed, fundamentally weak man who wears machismo like a suit of armor. He's someone who exerts nearly effortless control over the men around him, even as gazes wonderingly upon the emotions they express, asking like a child about loyalties, and affections, and connections, trying to comprehend what draws people together beyond profit and intimidation.

  When Dawson has feelings of his own — when, for example, he violates his most important rule and saves the life of the…

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  Review by Josh Gillam ★★★

  A criminal gang operates in Japan, confounding the authorities, and man attempts to join them, becoming drawn into danger, in Samuel Fuller’s noir thriller starring Robert Stack, Robert Ryan and Shirley Yamaguchi.

  Fuller makes the film visually striking, shooting it all on location, which gives everything an authenticity and sense of realism, even if the setting doesn’t factor into the plot that much. There are several tracking shots, especially one showing the gang dressed in suits fleeing after a heist, that feel very modern, and must have had some influence on later films like Reservoir Dogs.

  Stack, playing the sort of hardboiled antihero Richard Widmark often played in Fuller’s films, is really engaging in the lead role, and his gradual…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  I could watch that final chase/gunfight sequence over and over (and I did watch it twice), with every single camera angle chosen to tell just enough of a story to build a little tension and keep you apace of things. It's not action for the sake of spectacle, but action for the sake of feeling, of climax, of narrative, capping things off and not serving itself. Fuller sets his cameras well above, or well below, or just right, but never without purpose. But that font in the opening credits was outright fucking shameful.

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★★½

  "If you don't make a mistake, you never know when you're right."

  Undercover Army investigator Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack) heads to Tokyo to infiltrate a gang led by Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan) to expose their nefarious crimes and shut them down. Along the way he finds the potential for love with Mariko (Yoshiko Yamaguchi). 

  The Cinemascope w/ deLuxe colour here is really something else. Everything looks so vivid and rich. There's real depth and the shadows and blacks look fantastic and really stand out. Combine that with Fuller's incredible sense of economy and you get a film worth watching on its technical merits alone. Nothing is outwardly stagey or or showy, but when you get to the stunning finale that…

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  Review by Channing Pomeroy ★★★★ 1

  Fuller deracinates a shadowy American noir and transplants it in multicolored Occupied Japan. Old time studio screenwriters used to call this trick “the switcheroo” — taking a formula proven successful with audiences and switching up the elements to create a new work of art.

  Fuller seems to be experimenting with the capabilities of CinemaScope by selecting objectively unattractive settings — a slushy railroad overpass, a dirty river lined with shanties and ramified with docks, a gravel quarry billowing with smoke, bustling Tokyo intersections — to see if imaginative framing and CinemaScope lenses can transform them into art.

  There are also some genuinely marvelous sequences in this film. Some of my favorites include: the dead sergeant boots-first in the snow with…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★

  first and foremost, this is an incredible historical document of 50s post-war japan, fuller makes the maximum use of cinemascope's ability to capture the layered depth of locations and landscapes, and this is visually striking in a way that i haven't seen in his work thus far, with loads of glorious deep-focus shots and delicate silhouettes, misty mountains and sea-side smoke. he really delves into this wide strata of lived-in locations and social spaces that might have been ignored in a more set-bound, american-centric production. there's even footage of pachinko parlors! i've rarely seen non-japanese films from this time period take such a loving and detailed view of this era, and that by itself makes house of bamboo a valuable…

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  Review by Rembrandt Q Pumpernickel ★★★★ 4

  House of Bamboo is a film about a white detective trying to take down a group of white criminals in post-war Japan. But Fuller isn't using an exotified setting for a typical noir/detective film, rather the setting is a way to gently lampoon American occupation, to define Americans in post-war Japan as only being entirely self-concerned and consistently bungling anything having to do with actual Japanese people.

  A surprisingly large portion of the film is in Japanese and lacking subtitles. Being that I did not see this film in theaters but rather on DVD, I can't claim for sure that this was the original presentation, but it seems very in line with what the rest of the film is going…

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  Review by Dizzle_Sizzle ★★★½ 7

  Blown-out microcosm of postwar Tokyo set two years after the purported "end" of the US Occupation, Ryan's Sandy and his gang of brutish gaijin lapdogs keeping a low profile to merely blend in as the lot shamelessly appropriates everything from pachinko parlors to Japanese women. Functions well enough as culture clash hyperbole, the film tangentially combing through but ultimately brushing aside what an unendurable travesty Yamaguchi Yoshiko's perceived promiscuity could impose in a time before sexual liberation, leaning more effectually on Stack's Eddie as both an interloper and crucial catalyst inside a crew finding it harder and harder to stick to their guns and avoid suspicion. Absolutely love Sandy's could-be self-undoing through his growing admiration of Eddie with half-hearted, third-degree…

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  Review by Ryne Walley ★★★½

  "Poor guy, he didn’t know what he was doing. But I’ll say one thing… He sure knew how to die."

  The presentation of Fuller’s appetite for hard-bitten lyricism and volatile plotting in such dynamic milieu is a relentless pleasure. House of Bamboo paints the story’s roster of villains and victims against the sheer enormity of Japan, enveloping the cast in a vivid canvas where the details are stunning at any scale as the filmmaker uses the CinemaScope palette and bustling landscapes to superb effect. With the advantage of shooting on location in Tokyo and Yokohama, Fuller and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald (this being their third and final collaboration) fill the runtime with countless impressive compositions—the opening shots approaches the awe of…

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  Review by 🔮 dana danger 🔮 ★★★★

  a bright, candy-colored noir! i wish more of these had been filmed in cinemascope. it actually reminded me more of POINT BLANK (1967) than a traditional noir - it functions as a bridge between late film noir and new hollywood violent action films. seriously, the final shootout is amazing.

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  Review by Abdulla Alsaleh ★★★★★

  Despite how I had only heard of Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo just a few weeks ago, I decided to make it a priority to watch it before it gets removed from the Criterion Channel starting on the first of October, as he has grown to become one of my very favorite filmmakers after just seeing four movies of his, and I wanted to see how a fifth film would impact my view of his work. I went into this movie expecting a noir thriller that featured Fuller's pulpy storytelling, but what I got was so much more than that, and I'd honestly consider this to be one of his best films. House of Bamboo was the first movie of…