House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955)

Robert Ryan in House of Bamboo

Cast: Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi, Cameron Mitchell, Brad Dexter, Sessue Hayakawa, Biff Elliot, Sandro Giglio, DeForest Kelley, Eiko Hanabusa. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: Addison Hehr, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: James B. Clark. Music: Leigh Harline.

More slickly made and visually spectacular than the typical Samuel Fuller movie, House of Bamboo was the product of his flirtation with a major studio, 20th Century-Fox. Made on location, it gives us some fine CinemaScope images of mid-1950s Tokyo, though it sometimes drifts away from the story into tourist mode to justify them, as in the scene in which the guy we know as Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack) tours a Buddhist temple on the pretext of having a clandestine meeting with the cops he's secretly working for. There's also not much reason why Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan) should climb to the rotating observation platform on top of Matsuma department store for the final shootout, other than to provide some views of the city below. There's also an infusion of romance between Eddie and his supposed "kimona girl," as Sandy calls her, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), that's a little more sugary than we expect of Fuller's men and women. Despite his concessions, the studio wasn't happy working with Fuller, and he went his independent way again. It's certainly not a bad movie -- it has action and suspense and fine work by cinematographer Joseph MacDonald -- but it feels a bit superficial.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)

Lock Martin, Michael Rennie, and Patricia Neal in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Klaatu: Michael Rennie
Helen Benson: Patricia Neal
Tom Stevens: Hugh Marlowe
Prof. Jacob Barnhardt: Sam Jaffe
Bobby Benson: Billy Gray
Mrs. Barley: Frances Bavier
Gort: Lock Martin

Director: Robert Wise
Screenplay: Edmund H. North
Based on a story by Harry Bates
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Art direction: Addison Hehr, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: William Reynolds
Music: Bernard Herrmann

It's a truism that the science-fiction movies of the 1950s are really about the Bomb, the nascent Cold War, communism, McCarthyism, and other social and political crises of the era. All of that is apparent in perhaps the most celebrated film of the genre -- though I prefer The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951) -- Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. It has the virtue of being a straightforward fable: A being from another world comes to Earth to warn us that our bellicosity threatens the existence of the planet itself. And naturally, the reaction to his arrival is one of hysteria. But what the film really seems to me to be about is the disappearance of religious faith, something it rather clumsily suggests by having the messenger take on Christlike attributes: i.e., he performs miracles, dies, and is resurrected. The movie seems to suggest that we need a community of belief to survive, and not the fractured dialectic that has taken the place of a universal creed. The denizens of the other planets who have sent Klaatu to warn Earth have decided that true peace depends on a community guarded by robot policemen, of which Gort is the film's representative. For those of us now contemplating the warnings that artificial intelligence could produce sentient machines capable of developing a simulacrum of life, self-maintenance and reproduction, and hence of evolving into beings that might dominate humanity, this vision of submission to squads of robocops is rather chilling. Still, though The Day the Earth Stood Still is rather naive in its trust in technology, it's a well-made and provocative film that shaped the consciousness of my own generation, even if all we took away from it was a magical phrase: Klaatu barada nikto.