Review of House of Bamboo (1955) by Adam P — 02 Jul 2008

A film-noir plot shot in widescreen and Technicolor with almost no nondiegetic music and a near complete absence of any shot closer than medium-wide? Very strange, especially from a director as characteristically visceral as Fuller.

Still--treating the crime drama with the sensibilities of an epic--sizing up interrogation scenes to be long-take wide angles or shooting a death-bed scene entirely in one high-angle ceiling shot for example--this is also a very neat inversion of genre expectations.

Creating a viewer-character distance through stylistic limitation of music, cuts, and angles, Fuller succeeds in finding a new and creative way to express the coldheartedness of the noir. It's an experiment that only partly works, the distancing effect also negating many thrills for those not paying RAPT attention.