Tokyo Joe (1949) - film review

War veteran Joe Barrett returns to Japan after WWII hoping to pick up the pieces of his shattered life.  To his surprise, his gambling joint is still intact, being run by his old friend and business partner.  Joe can hardly believe his good fortune when he learns that his wife Trina is still alive and hastens to find her, only to learn that she has since re-married and has a seven year old daughter.  Joe swears that he will win Trina back, but the occupying American army is reluctant to let him stay.  Tired of filling in forms for a permit that will extend his stay, Joe decides to start up a legitimate business, a freight operation financed by Baron Kimura, the former head of the Japanese secret service.  What Joe does not know is that Kimura has some incriminating knowledge about Trina’s wartime past and intends to use the freight business to covertly transport war criminals...

Tokyo Joe is the second of Humphrey Bogart’s independent productions after the actor had cut his moorings with Warner Brothers, the company that made him a star.  It is a ramshackle mixed bag of a film, a somewhat clumsy attempt to combine elements of Casablanca and the traditional American film noir crime drama.  Although the film is quite well directed and well photographed, the heavy plot contrivances soon become wearying and the two-dimensional characterisation does little to sustain the spectator’s interest.  Bogart puts in a respectable performance, playing the kind of character that he made his own - a man who is outwardly tough but inwardly very vulnerable, a man who would risk anything in an attempt to recapture the smallest fragment of his happier past. Unfortunately, without matching contributions from his lacklustre co-stars, Bogart’s efforts are pretty much wasted.  The only other character of interest is the gangster boss Kimura, played with the appropriate note of sinister menace by Sessue Hayakawa, who would later feature in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?