You know what the army do with an agent found behind enemy lines. Warning: Spoilers House of Bamboo is directed by Sam Fuller who also co-writes with Harry Kleiner. It stars Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi and Cameron Mitchell. It's a CinemaScope production with colour by De Luxe, with photography by Joseph MacDonald. Leigh Harline scores the music and the film is a loose remake of The Street with No Name (1948), where Kleiner & MacDonald were also involved. The film is exclusively shot on location in Japan. Tokyo, 1954, and an underworld outfit of American ex-servicemen are thriving on criminal activity. Their newest recruit is Eddie Spanier (Stack), in town to hook up with an old friend, his plans go awry on the news that his pal was killed during a robbery. But he catches the eye of the mob leader, Sandy Dawson (Ryan), and so begins a relationship that will have far reaching consequences for everyone involved with the two men. A train draws to a halt on a bridge in snowy Tokyo, at its point of stopping the train is perfectly overlooked by a snow capped Mount Fuji. It's a moment of beauty, quite serene, then violence explodes as the train is robbed and death shatters the moment. And so Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo begins. One of the first Hollywood movies to be shot in Japan post World War II, it's a film that's as gritty as it is surprisingly violent. Yet…

When a man is mysteriously murdered in Tokyo, the US Army plants it's streetwise investigator "Eddie" (Robert Stack) into the city with a mission to inveigle himself into a gang of petty American racketeers. It's quite easy for him get their attention, but securing the trust of "Sandy" (Robert Ryan) isn't so straightforward, especially as his sidekick "Griff" (Cameron Mitchell) is both wary and jealous of this new addition to their numbers. As this gang start to become more ambitious with their criminal activities , "Eddie" finds his position becoming more and more perilous. Can he survive the double-crossing and bring his quarry to book? There were quite a few of these post-war, culture-clash crime dramas made and this isn't really especially notable. Stack and Ryan both do just about enough but the ease by which the mystery is unraveled and the rather cluttering up romance with "Mariko" (Shirley Yamaguchi) leave too much of this until the last ten minutes which is all a bit rushed. It was filmed on location, which certainly helps, but this is still all just a little too join-the-dots to be particularly memorable.

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