Two charismatic actors (Bogart and Hayakawa), two exceptional performances (Teru Shimada and Alexander Knox), and two powerful scenes redeem this otherwise disappointing film.
First, the disappointments: director Heisler and leading lady Marly. Both clearly earned their downward-spiraling careers, each ending up cranking out small-screen stuff like "77 Sunset Strip." Equally disappointing is the on-location filming-- not that it's bad. It memorably exposes the destruction of Tokyo (half the city was bombed to rubble by us); unfortunately, the vintage footage is put in amateurish hands, resulting in painfully obvious use of rear projection when Bogart himself is in the frame, or painfully obvious use of a double wearing a trench coat and fedora.
The two powerful scenes occur in the final half hour, and they are noteworthy if only because they remind modern audiences that brutal scenes do not need to be bloody scenes:
First, we're in a cargo plane en route back to Japan, and though there is no explicit violence, the danger is palpable because the audience knows that the war criminals on board are capable of absolutely anything.
Second, a rare portrayal of seppuku, filmed in a way that relies entirely on the actor's expressions to convey the barbarity of what he is doing to himself — and he succeeds so well that you simultaneously can't take your eyes off his face, and can't stand to watch.
Both scenes have far more do with Japanese characters than with Americans, and that is the real strength of this film: The Japanese are not treated as clichés of cruelty-- or of comedy, as they are in the artlessly racist "Lost in Translation" (2003). In "Tokyo Joe," the Japanese are every bit as complex as the Americans, if not more so. Their characters are the losers of the war, after all, the people learning to live, as one of them says, "in shame."
First, the disappointments: director Heisler and leading lady Marly. Both clearly earned their downward-spiraling careers, each ending up cranking out small-screen stuff like "77 Sunset Strip." Equally disappointing is the on-location filming-- not that it's bad. It memorably exposes the destruction of Tokyo (half the city was bombed to rubble by us); unfortunately, the vintage footage is put in amateurish hands, resulting in painfully obvious use of rear projection when Bogart himself is in the frame, or painfully obvious use of a double wearing a trench coat and fedora.
The two powerful scenes occur in the final half hour, and they are noteworthy if only because they remind modern audiences that brutal scenes do not need to be bloody scenes:
First, we're in a cargo plane en route back to Japan, and though there is no explicit violence, the danger is palpable because the audience knows that the war criminals on board are capable of absolutely anything.
Second, a rare portrayal of seppuku, filmed in a way that relies entirely on the actor's expressions to convey the barbarity of what he is doing to himself — and he succeeds so well that you simultaneously can't take your eyes off his face, and can't stand to watch.
Both scenes have far more do with Japanese characters than with Americans, and that is the real strength of this film: The Japanese are not treated as clichés of cruelty-- or of comedy, as they are in the artlessly racist "Lost in Translation" (2003). In "Tokyo Joe," the Japanese are every bit as complex as the Americans, if not more so. Their characters are the losers of the war, after all, the people learning to live, as one of them says, "in shame."