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The postcard view of Mount Fuji is promptly jangled by the brutal heist of an ammunition train, when next seen the snow-capped volcano is framed by a corpse's splayed fleet. The war after the war, Samuel Fuller in Tokyo, a continuous inquiry into arresting spaces. Bathhouses, wharfside shanties, the rooftop rehearsal of a Noh troupe caught in a remarkable tracking shot, still the mysterious Yank stomper (Robert Stack) can only ask if anybody speaks "a little English." The fallen henchman was secretly married, his widow (Shirley Yamaguchi) plays the stranger's "kimonah" girl in an investigation of the GI-turned-crime boss (Robert Ryan) who "runs his outfit like a five-star general." (A startling moment has the hero getting slugged at a pachinko parlor and ripping through a wall of rice paper to reveal an audience of hoodlums on the other side.) The robberies are military operations, as befits the mixture of combat and gangster tropes, wounded cohorts are swiftly eliminated: "Oh, I know it sounds inhuman, but so far it's paid off." Japan, old and new in the charged CinemaScope rectangle, the stately tea ceremony that morphs into a brassy jitterbugging shindig. American truculence dwarfed from the looming Buddha's vantage, noir fedoras crammed within the placid garden pavilion. Races and forms in collision, a pungent Fuller theme, screens brought down and lifted up like Capra's Walls of Jericho. The jealous hothead (Cameron Mitchell) takes six bullets in the wooden bathtub, the unbroken scene continues with outrageous calm as life and water leak out of him and Ryan soliloquizes about betrayal and responsibility. "My mother didn't raise me to be a dog-robber." White Heat for the climactic shootout, grand consequences for Oshima and Suzuki and Fukasaku. Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald. With Sessue Hayakawa, Brad Dexter, DeForest Kelley, Biff Elliot, Robert Quarry, and Teru Shimada.
--- Fernando F. Croce |