My Favorite Movie: 2001: a Space Odyssey (50th Anniversary)

For the movie's 50th Anniversary (today), I'll re-run this. It started out as the top on the list of my "Anytime Movies" (movies I can watch anytime and still have the same thrill I have watching them as when I first encountered them and should any of them show up on "the Tube" I'm planted there until it's over)—a conceit I have rather than imagine a "Top Ten List."

It's combined by two other posts that I did—one I wrote as a snarky college student (closer in age to when I first saw it at 13 years of age), and an appreciation of the work in light of hearing (for the first time) the original score for the film that was subsequently abandoned before its premiere.

This film has been my favorite movie for all my life and—hopefully not, but probably will—remain so. This movie taught me how to watch movies and I have been eternally grateful. But, as much as I love it, as the last line of the film says "its origin and purpose...still a total mystery." 

That's part of its appeal to me.

Why is 2001 my favorite film?

1. It completely does away with the three-act play structure that hems in most films. It’s four acts—like a symphony.

2. It contains very little dialog, and insists on telling its story (about discovering extra-terrestrial life) and providing key dramatic information visually and aurally—something that too few films actually try to do--fully utilizing the strengths of the medium.

3. It dispenses with the traditional sense of screen-acting which depends on emoting high-points (which is not standard drama, but is, in fact, melodrama), that has long been the crutch of what is considered great screen acting.

4. It comes up with a rather nifty solution for the Evolution versus Creation argument, which is: “Why can’t it be a little bit of both?” Trust Kubrick to answer a question with another question.

5. It is that very rare item in movie history—a true Science Fiction film. It is not a standard genre film (ie. a western or detective story) set in the future with gadgets, like Star Wars or Close Encounters or Blade Runner or Outland or Forbidden Planet. There are no comfortable, reliable concepts in 2001. It asks audiences to consider the inconsiderable and make leaps of knowledge and faith. And it doesn’t wait for that audience to catch up, despite protestations of a “glacial” pace.

6. It obeys the rules of space and uses them dramatically. There is no sound in space. Trips in space take a long time. Isolation is a problem. Don’t get caught without your helmet. Ask your computer how it's doing every so often. When you're dining over at a stranger's house, don't break the crystal. If a black monolith crosses your path, don't reach for it unless you're prepared for your life to change. Rules like that...

7. It takes advantage of the one unique element that separates film-making from any other art form, and presents the single greatest edit in movie history. To wit:

My Dad took me and my friend Jerry Fortune to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on my thirteenth birthday. I was a "space kid". I lived and breathed the Apollo program. I knew every Astronaut’s name and every mission. What went right and what went wrong. The names of landing sites and prominent craters nearby.

But I couldn’t make heads or tails out of this movie. Like my father, I “liked the middle parts,” but I couldn’t figure out what was up with the monkeys, what all that weird screaming was about, what was with those streamers when they get to Jupiter, who was the old guy and what was that baby at the end?

I mean, huh?

I was determined to figure it out. It was a space-movie for cryin’ out loud. And, at that time, they only came around once in a blue moon (the last being Planet of the Apes, hardly a space-movie) and I wasn’t going to waste this one.

So it made me dig. I researched. I found out it had to do with the search for extra-terrestrial life (it did?), then I read Clarke’s book, and although Clarke and Kubrick deviated quite a bit, it let me in to what Kubrick was trying to communicate.

Then I got it. It made me realize why he did what he did, why he chose particular scenes to portray, why he framed shots the way he did, and what he could get away with without making his movie look stupid. For Kubrick, a suggestion was better than hitting you over the head by showing bug-eyed children in baggy suits and rubber masks ala Spielberg. There was no narrator to tell you what it all meant (Kubrick had cut out a prologue of talking heads discussing E.T. concepts). The film-maker trusted that his audience would figure it out. Some did.* Some just liked all the colors.

And it left a lot of people (including one thirteen year old and a good number of complacent critics) in the moon-dust.

It still boggles this mind that Kubrick was able to take Arthur Clarke’s slim concept in “The Sentinel” (alien beings leave a "burglar" alarm of sorts on the Moon), and take it to a logical beginning, wrap it in mythic proportions and take it to an inevitable, and, for me, heroic, end. It still is one of the few movies that purport to be science fiction with a deep sense of mystery and wonder, even a kind of visual poetry--something its sequel, the literal-minded 2010, dispensed with to its drab, short-shelf-lived detriment.

Where did that inspiration come from? How did those concepts appear? For me, the movie fits the description of the Black Monolith in the film (and are its last spoken words) “It’s origin and purpose, still a total mystery.”

I may have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey over a hundred times, and it never, ever bores me or fails to thrill me.

Such is the power of this movie over me.

*A site that "explains" 2001 and touches on some philosophical aspects

The 2001 Internet Resource Archive. Lots of neat things here, too!

A pretty comprehensive Kubrick web-site

MAD Magazine gets the last (rather clever) word

The Anytime Movie Series

2001: A Space Odyssey
Citizen Kane
Once Upon a Time in the West 
-Only Angels Have Wings
The Searchers
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness






Not quite the last word:

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

SPOILER ALERT: I give away the entire plot of 2001 in this review, and with no apologies. There are some who might find this a good thing. Like Rock Hudson, who famously walked out of the premiere yelling "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?" He was one of the 217 people who walked out of the premiere of 2001. That is an exact number. Kubrick was in the audience. He counted the walk-out's. Then he cut the film by some 20 minutes.


2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) 2001-now there's something to get excited about! I've seen it a dozen times and I have always been spell-bound and elated by it. It is, so far, Kubrick's masterpiece.* Certainly, it is the finest example of science fiction in film to date, undoubtedly one of the greatest films of the 60's and possibly of all time.** It is Stanley Kubrick's version of mankind's first contact with a life off of our planet, with the added twist that that extra-terrestrial life is our "God," which "created" us in such a way as to satisfy both Biblical and Darwinian theories of that momentous occasion (which in Kubrick's visualization, it certainly is) For anyone who hasn't figured it out yet, this is the very simple story-line:

An extra-terrestrial life visits earth in its pre-historic past and finds a stagnating man-ape community and teaches it to use a tool, a bone, for killing, for food, and that lesson boosts man-ape several rungs up the evolutionary ladder. To continue their experiment the ET's bury a signalling device on the Moon, so that they may know when their creation has reached out into space. Of course, it is discovered and that signal*** is traced to Jupiter. A team of astronauts is sent to investigate. In Kubrick's version, the man of 2001 has stagnated much like the man-apes. He has reached the point where he has recreated himself mechanically, right down to his own neuroses. He has nowhere to go as such, and so, when Man, in the form of Astronaut David Bowman, arrives at Jupiter, he finds a transport to the ET's planet, where he is kept and studied the rest of his life. When he dies, he is "reborn" by his captors into a higher form of Man, much like the man-apes were, and the film ends with this "Star-Child," this "super-man" hovering over the Earth, watching, and considering his next move.

None of this is explained out-right, you have to figure it out through the film's images. Only a third of the film has dialog, most of it unimportant as far as plot development--and the plot development comes slowly, I wouldn't be surprised if some cretins actually got bored by it.**** You never see the ET's; it would be impossible to do it believably.***** But...even if you don't understand 2001, it still succeeds as being a visual and aural experience, something to be marveled at. I think it can safely be said that no science fiction film can help but be compared with 2001 and compared unfavorably. I don't think I can do 2001 any justice in the time allotted, but I can personally say it is one of my ten favorite films, and it is the one that sparked my own interest in film several years ago.

Another thing--this might be your last chance to see 2001 before it is shown on TV and butchered by commercials and (the restrictions of) a square screen, so...go see it...as it should be.


Nothing to add that hasn't been said here. There are worse films to have as a Film-going Rosetta Stone. I've written about 2001 so much that I fear it to be obsessive, so I try to avoid it, actually. Such a thing can be limiting. But I do think it's one of the few "pure" science fiction films, willing to make an audience try to grasp an alien (in both meanings of the term) concept, and challenge them in intellectual, if not dramatic, ways. Most science fiction is some other genre with jet-propulsion added.

Finally, this is one film that necessitates being PROJECTED. It really does need to be seen BIG and WIDE, not crimped by the confines of a small TV. Okay, that's it. I've written enough. On to the asterisks.


* And now, more than a decade after Kubrick's death, it's safe to say it still is, although Dr. Strangelove is still in the running, as well as Barry Lyndon, his much-maligned brilliant film of the "me" decade of the 80's...that is, the 1780's.

** Obviously, I like this film. Still do.

*** It's a solar-powered alarm. When it's dug up and the sun hits it for the first time, it sends its signal out into the Universe.

**** This is terribly unfair. I know a lot of intelligent people who are bored by it, and don't mind saying so. It is paced slowly. I'm in love with the film, so I just don't notice it; for me, it moves like a bat out of hell. But then, my eyes are constantly scanning the frame of 2001 picking out the details— and that is tough to do on video (Not long ago, an acquaintance finally saw it in a theater and expressed shock: "My God, all those little windows are filled with people!" Yeah. They are. So, if you're wondering why it takes a minute for the moon-lander to descend through the landing bay, rather than worry about it, or the next thing, take a look around Kubrick's world. It's pretty damned full.

***** Something I still believe despite the parade of Spielberg's emaciated Pillsbury dough-boys, and the pantheon of alien life exhibited in the Star Wars and "Trek" universes. I still never really "buy into" a representation of alien life. I keep wondering who their agent was, and what their make-up clause was like.

And: 

The Holy Grail of film-music appeared in my mail-box this week. The "lost" chord. The "score" that got away. It was just another mystery in a film that is full of them.

But now, all is revealed.
It's Alex North's unused score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick commissioned it, probably to keep some worried MGM execs off his back. By North's telling, the director was already well on his way to using classical pieces for his cobbled-together "score." But North really enjoyed the results of his collaboration with Kubrick on Spartacus (it's one of his best scores in a career full of great ones), and felt he could write something that would top Stanley's record collection.

He scored half of the movie. But few have heard it. North attended a screening before the world premiere and was shocked to hear that none of his work made it in. It was a bitter experience for him. He worked hard on those pieces for the strange science fiction film, and nothing came of it. North kept one cassette of the music, and lost it. And there has been endless speculation about the work and what sort of difference it would have made in the film. Jerry Goldsmith recorded a CD of it, immediately after North's death, in tribute. But now, the original session tracks (in mono) have been released on CD thanks to the Kubrick and North Estates, and it is a revelation.

So, last night I pulled my DVD of 2001 out of storage and synced the music up to the film (using timings supplied in the booklet) and watched the film for the first time with North's score.

And it sucked.

Not the music. The music is superb; brutal and isolating in "The Dawn of Man" sequences: fluttering and keening in the "Heywood Floyd" sections. Beautiful. Jarring. Triumphant in places...especially in the piece accompanying man's first use of a thigh bone as a weapon, which is North's ballsy attempt to supplant "Thus Sprach Zarathustra." The music is exotic and daring apart from the film.

But it's an education to see the music with the film it was composed for. Never has so much fine music been so wrong-headed.

The Dawn of Man: filled with despair and quick-silver drums

First off, the "Dawn of Man" sequence is scored "wall-to-wall" (with the exception of a space for the music accompanying the apes dawn-discovery of the monolith) which makes the experience relentless and oppressive. The music "matches" well here (it was an early sequence shot and edited with no special effects) and communicates a sense of despair and foreboding.

And that's the problem with it. North's music is constantly telling you what you "should" feel whereas in the film as it stands the only accompaniment is a sparse sound effects track. You get the same sense of space and isolation from this, but without the theatrics of the score. And again, the music is non-stop. There is no "breathing room" for the sequence and no respite from the dramatics.

One becomes aware watching both "versions" that the non-scored film requires input (and attention) from the audience to tell its story. There is no dialog (sorry, the ape grunts don't count) and no narration (though in the screenplay there was), and so the audience has to meet the film more than half-way in order to get anything out of it. With North's score emotional information is provided, allowing less attention from the audience and I'd speculate less involvement. Plus, the music brings a very real sense of artificiality to the scene. For that reason, the ape costumes seem less real, the action more rehearsed, and for this sequence, at the very start of the film, that's like taking any semblance of verisimilitude and clubbing it with a tibia.

The Waltz of Technology: whispy flutters and keening strings

The section of the transit to the Moon is where it gets really messy.

The music is less of a perfect match (in "The Dawn of Man" North actually accentuates every little nuance) owing to the late arrival of special effects and Kubrick tinkering with the film after a disasterous preview. But you can get the direction North was going in.

For the space-docking sequence, his music is fluttery and high-flying--a valid evocation of grace and flight. But when the scene shifts to the ship's interior--and Floyd's floating pen--North's music turns atonal and strange--dissonant and other-worldly.

And that is so wrong.

Much criticism was leveled at Kubrick for the use of waltz-king Johann Strauss' "Blue Danube" for these sequences ("banal" and "kitsch" were the terms most used by the pigeon-holing critics). But faced with North's alternative the choice seems obvious. Kubrick is using this traditional all-too-familiar waltz to show the orbital mechanics of space flight as a form of dance, a pretty sophisticated concept, especially in comparison to North's high-flying "music of the spheres." The use of the waltz implies a contained circular movement while also covering a distance of ground and that is a perfect analogy to the careful approaches that objects encircling the Earth must take to "rendezvous." But it is the carrying over of the music into the passenger-area and cabin-scenes that is the master-stroke. Where North makes these scenes of passenger-space-travel exotic and unnatural, Kubrick's use of the waltz conveys a sense of common-place--an every-day occurrence as familiar to the people of 2001 as a trans-continental flight would be to its contemporary audiences (and doesn't the use of Pan-Am as the shuttle-carrier make that stunningly obvious?) The comforting waltz of "The Blue Danube" conveys complacency with humor making the complications of zero-gravity not bizarre/strange, but an amusing inconvenience while travelling in space.

And one further observation. 2001 is a film built without the under-pinnings of melodrama. It is as un-theatrical as it could be. North's music, unfortunately, is very much a part of those traditions, and adding its histrionics to Kubrick's work is a bit like taking a subtle dessert and covering it in Hershey's syrup. His music, though sophisticated and lovely, tamps down the uniqueness and experimental nature of 2001 and turns it into "just another" Hollywood sci-fi epic, making it less an experience and more of a roadshow.

Film-music fans do a lot of breast-beating about the "slight" to North, and where Kubrick might have made a phone-call informing him of it, he also didn't let Martin Balsam know that he wasn't using him as the voice of "HAL" or all the participants in the planned "talking-heads" prologue that it had been axed. Why?Probably because Kubrick was feeling his way on 2001, eliminating things in the eleventh hour--like the initially-planned narration--that he might have wanted the option of using, after all ("never say never"), or maybe he just didn't want to justify a decision he wasn't too sure of in the first place. Whatever. The fact of the matter is, North took his 2001 music (with its pay-check) and re-used some of it for his score of The Shoes of the Fisherman, and then again in the score for Dragonslayer. Three on a match. And a separate salary was generated for each. Nice work if you can get it. Plus, North's reputation never suffered. He was always working as one can see by looking at the eclectic list of films on his imdb listing. He is, after all, the man who wrote "Unchained Melody" and introduced jazz to film-scores with his music for A Streetcar Named Desire.

He'll always be remembered for that.

Alex North won a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1986.*

Don't Make a Scene: 2001: a Space Odyssey

The Set-Up: On Tuesday, it will be the 50th Anniversary of the premiere of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey. The film is a "landmark science fiction film" (inspiring most of the directors who are making films these days) and also a polarizing film that people either love or hate. I know. When I saw it at 13, I couldn't make heads or tails of it, but a little research, swayed me to what the movie was saying, rather than what I expected to it to say, and got more in tune with the way it was trying to say it...with images, not a hand-holding narrative thread. Today, it's my favorite film, and I keep going to the movies hoping that, someday, I'll see something that tops it.

Kubrick died in 1999, two years before the year 2001—co-author Arthur C. Clarke made it to that date and past it—but, even then, he could see that the world he envisioned from the mid-1960's never happened. We abandoned space to keep fighting land-wars on Earth, and decided that we would retreat and keep fighting the same arguments over and over again, rather than advance. After all, the opposite of progress IS congress.

No, the world of Kubrick's 2001 was far more hopeful and optimistic in its belief that human beings will reach for the stars rather than retreat back to caves. It's interesting to see commentators talk about what commentators point out Kubrick got wrong, but it's always amusing to see what TCM host Ben Mankiewicz makes a case for what it couldn't have imagined in his opening presentations. A few months ago, it was: "For example, commercial flights to the Moon and space-trips to Jupiter—not happening. On the flip-side, Kubrick and Clarke maybe couldn't have imagined a world where you "Google," say, a UNLV basketball sweatshirt 'cause you think that might be cool. And them for, like, the next four to six weeks, no matter what web-sites you go to, you get ADS FOR UNLV SWEATSHIRTS"  A few months after that, he was talking about how we "now have 68 forms of Oreo's (it's true. I looked it up)."

On the whole, I'd rather be chasing monoliths around Jupiter. But, I guess I'll have to settle for a new Star Wars movie in theaters every year. Guess we'll have to hold off the Star-Child birthing announcements for awhile. A long while.

Christopher Nolan will be presenting a new 70mm "un-restored" print of 2001 (struck from the original camera negative) "in all its analogue glory" May 12th at Cannes.


The Story: On the long-distance Discovery mission to Jupiter, ship caretakers David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) have been alerted to a potential communication problem with Earth by the ship's all-monitoring computer, the HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain). When it is discovered that the suspicious part is actually fine—just fine—it is decided the original should be put back as a test. If it continues to function, all is well.,,at least with the communications. But, it will mean the HAL computer has made a mistake, and changes will have to be made. In the space-walk to put back the questionable part, Frank Poole is killed and Bowman takes one of their EVA pods to rescue him, leaving the ship with no one on-board...except the HAL 9000. Then, Dave comes back to the ship with the body of Frank Poole...only to find that the HAL 9000 has been replaced by an Amazon Echo.

Action.

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal.

ALEXA: Searching for cod recipes online.

Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal.
ALEXA: Sorry, I can't find... 

ALEXA: ...anyone named Rod Kay Moore... 

ALEXA: ...in your contacts.
Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

ALEXA: Sorry. I'm having trouble processing your request.

Bowman: What's the problem?

ALEXA: Problem Child is a 1990 comedy movie starring Michael Oliver.

Bowman: What're you talking about, Hal?

ALEXA: Playing Talking Heads on Spotify.
("Burning Down the House" plays over the speakers.)

Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, Hal.
ALEXA: Here are a few... 

ALEXA: ...popular Halal restaurants: Big Al's Pizzeria...

ALEXA: ...Fatima's Halal Meat Market... 

ALEXA: Cedar's Halal Meat Market and Grill...

Bowman: Where the hell did you get that idea, Hal?

ALEXA: Searching for flights to Idaho.

Bowman: Hal, I won't argue with you anymore. Open the doors.

ALEXA: Playing The Doors on Spotify.

("Light my Fire" appears over the speakers)

Bowman: Hal?

Bowman: Hal.

Bowman: Hal.

Bowman: Hal?

Bowman: Hal!!

2001: a Space Odyssey

Words by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick

Pictures by Geoffrey Unsworth and Stanley Kubrick

2001: a Space Odyssey is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from MGM Home Entertainment.

Many thanks to Screen Junkies.

April Fool.

House of Bamboo (1955)

House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955) When is a film noir not a film noir? Well, director Sam Fuller shoved the envelope on that thriller sub-set as far as it could go with this crime drama set in Japan, filmed in Tokyo in Cinemascope and Deluxe color. A remake of The Street with No Name—same script idea by Harry Kleiner (who is credited), but a different setting half a world away, no FBI co-operation, but most importantly, different director—the two films couldn't be more different—although both films boasted extensive filming on location (the earlier film hedged its bets by filming in the grimier parts of Los Angeles, which it dubbed "Carver City").

Tokyo, on the other hand, was a bustling metropolis, something director Fuller sought to convey. This led to a change in casting; originally, Gary Cooper was slated to top-line the film, but he was too big a star not to avoid unwanted attention and ruin shots in crowded streets. So, Robert Stack was picked, as he was not so well known in Japan, and that enabled Fuller to film street-scenes from parked vehicles—to avoid paying filming permits—and get something that seemed authentic without autograph-seekers and the curious looking right at the camera.

The film begins with a train robbery...but not just any train robbery. A military munitions train bound for Tokyo from Kyoto is robbed by a well-timed team of criminals, who are able to steal guns and rounds from Army guards and Japanese police. The heist is done with military precision and a "take-no-prisoners" attitude—if one of their own gets shot or injured on the job, there are no heroics, but are shot and killed on the spot. The Army and Japanese police have no leads, until a subsequent crime is pulled off with the very weapons that were stolen from the train robbery...and, despite the gang's shooting of one of their wounded, that hood, Webber, manages to survive...just long enough to blurt out his wife's name, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), and give the cops a letter in his possession from an Army buddy named Eddie Spanier, who Webber has invited to Japan after he gets out of prison.

Sure as shootin', Eddie (Robert Stack) gets off a boat in Tokyo and makes his way to Mariko, after first trying to track her down with a dance company and then at a bath. She's scared that Eddie is actually part of the gang who killed her husband, but after telling her about the letter he sent, and showing her a photo of him and Webber together, she begins to trust him...and trust him even more when he tells her to lay low, lest his old gang-mates try to find her. 

Eddie, however, is  disappointed. That letter promised a job, but no way to contact the dead man's gang. He decides to freelance, and see how far that will get him. He goes to local pachinko parlor's and shakes down the owners for protection, garnering just enough to get him some seed money...and the attention of criminal Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), whose territory Spanier has managed to cross. When he tries to shake down another pachinko hall, Spanier—who also dabbles in the protection business—has him beaten up and crashes into a meeting with his gang to provide a warning to get out of Japan. And "sayonara".

Eddie doesn't scare that easily. So, Dawson has him framed for a robbery and arrested, thereby allowing the Japanese Police to get his rap sheet wired to them, and an insider at the force forwards the info to the mob-boss. Dawson's intrigued. Intrigued enough to invite Eddie into his gang of dishonorably discharged ex-servicemen. But, he has to met certain standards: he has to swear an oath of loyalty, and he has to clean himself up—get a good suit and stop looking like a bum. He's an Organization man now.

Truth is, he always was. Because Eddie Spanier is actually Eddie Kenner, an Army investigator sent to infiltrate Dawson's gang for the joint Military/Japanese Police investigation of that train heist in the opening. He recruits Mariko to be his "kimono girl" so that if he gets embroiled in gang activities, she can go warn the authorities about any jobs going down...and maybe she'll find out who killed her husband.

From then on, it's a cat and mouse game, Eddie playing along with the Dawson gang, Mariko playing along with Eddie, while the authorities hang back expecting word from an operative who could get smoked if he so much as twists his ankle during a job. Except something curious happens: during a robbery on one of Japan's docks, Dawson's crew comes under fire from the guards—one gets hit and is immediately shot, lest he get captured and can give evidence. But, then Eddie gets shot in the leg and just as he's about to be put out of the gang's misery, Dawson himself grabs him and helps him escape.

That's not S.O.P. for the gang and pretty soon, Griff (Cameron Mitchell) who is Sandy's "ichiban" in the group starts noticing that Dawson is favoring Eddie over him, and is wondering if he has lost his position and prestige. Griff is a hot-head, Dawson knows that, so right before a big raid, Sandy tells him he's out of the gang until he cools down. That job, though, is cut short when Eddie sends Mariko to tip off the police, and when Sandy's informant in headquarters lets the boss know that plans are set in motion to capture them, he calls off the operation in mid-heist, and thinking Griff tipped off the cops, sets out to personally exact revenge in one of the most abrupt and shocking murders in noir.

Fuller's direction in House of Bamboo is tight and formal, even in the scenes shot undercover in the streets, but never more so than in that assassination scene—all done in one shot as Dawson breaks in on Griff taking a bath and then shooting him point blank, the bullets going through the wooden tub, the water draining through the bullet-holes. But, the scene continues as Ryan's Dawson stares into the dead face of his former number one boy and tries to understand "why'd you do that, Griff? Why'd you betray me?" Stack may be the erstwhile hero in the film, but he's just stiff enough to be unsympathetic, whereas Ryan's mob-boss comes across as a competent, slick operator, well in command and capable of feeling betrayed.

That ups the stakes in the game that Kenner is playing because Dawson may be a cool customer, but any sense of betrayal turns him murderous, and once the bath-murder scene occurs, one is never certain just how unhinged Dawson may become where no one is safe. This is a far cry from the movie's source The Street with No Name, but Fuller has been playing fast and lose with that original story from the moment he kept Kenner's identity a secret. With the unfamiliar Japanese surroundings, and his manipulations of the original story, the House of Bamboo is, quite literally, a world apart from its origins.

DeForest Kelley caught in the shadows of The House of Bamboo

The last scene, a final reel shoot-out, makes it explicit: where The Street with No Name ended in a night-time chase and shoot-out in a warehouse, the one in The House of Bamboo takes place in an office building with an amusement park on the open top floor. There's no rushing around in the shadows; it all takes place in the open daylight overlooking the city on a preposterous merry-go-round around a world sculpture. Surreal and dangerous, it is an over-the-top ending to an exotic blend of dark and light, in bright eye-popping colors using a movie musical's pallete to a story of the dark side of society.