Tokyo Joe
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Movie Reviews of Tokyo Joe
Movie Review: Another Great Bogart
Summary: 5 Stars
There is a reason the AFI ranked Bogart as the #1 actor in the history of film, The Enforcer was a great movie and one that I own.Movie Review: Just Bogart being Bogie.
Summary: 4 Stars
It is middlin'. Neither his best or worst which is to say, damn good. He is Joe, owner of a bar/nightclub, in Tokyo, before the war. During the war he was a bomber pilot, & is back after to reclaim his club. He considers Tokyo his home town, but things have changed. His club is now off limits to Americans. He finds his wife, who he thought was dead, alive & remarried. He had left her in Tokyo a week before Pearl Harbor & couldn't get back, until now. She has a child that is his but is not at all thrilled to see him. She is comfortable with her new, rich American husband. Needing a source of income, Joe becomes the front for a shady Japanese businessman in the air freight business. This is the Bogie we love, rough around the edges, a good guy, but world weary & cynical. As a pilot he is smuggling war criminals back to Japan. He wants out but his partner has evidence that his wife was a war collaborator. Then his child is kidnapped. This movie has a good blend of romance drama & action. He is a hero in the end rescuing his daughter. He is severly wounded, but it's not revealed if he gets his wife back or even if he survives his gunshot wound. A worthy, enjoyable Bogart movie.Movie Review: Bogart in Post-War Japan
Summary: 4 Stars
TOKYO JOE (1949) may not be one of Humphrey Bogart's classic films, but it is certainly an entertaining thriller that features Bogie playing the kind of hard-boiled character that pleased his audiences.
Set in post-war Japan, the Stuart Heisler-directed picture has Bogart cast as an ex-serviceman, returning to Tokyo, his home before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He is surprised to learn that his wife (Florence Marly), who he thought was dead, has divorced him and is now married to attorney Alexander Knox. He also learns that he has a child.
To stay in Japan, Bogart forms an alliance with ex-Secret Service head Sessue Hayakawa. They start an air-freight business together, which Bogie soon learns is just a front to smuggle Japanese war criminals back into the country. Events come to a head when Hayakawa kidnaps Bogart's child to insure his silence.
If you like Bogart, this one is worth a look.
© Michael B. Druxman
Movie Review: "Trina...listen to me. I don't plan to live without you again. I can prove you belong to me anytime I put my hands on you."
Summary: 3 Stars
Joe Barrett sure knows how to woo `em.
Humphrey Bogart made some doozies in the late Forties and early Fifties. He liked to keep working, but either he or his agent had some lousy taste: Chain Lighting (1950). Sirocco (1951). Battle Circus (opposite June Allyson, no less) (1953). Tokyo Joe fits right in. It's not just that these movies are hackwork, but Bogart's iconic mug is showing his age. He was 50 when he made Tokyo Joe. He can snarl, threaten, sneer and go wooing with the best, better, in fact, than the best, but it's Silly Symphonies when he undertakes judo or throws more than one or two punches.
With Tokyo Joe we're not just talking stunt doubles. Every shot in Tokyo with a guy in a trench coat wearing a hat where we can't see a face is a fake Bogart. There are a lot of them. Every shot of Bogart facing the camera with Tokyo in the background is just Bogart on a Hollywood sound stage with backscreen projection. There are a lot more of these. All that backscreen stuff is handled carelessly.
Like most strong actors, Bogart worked best, in my opinion, when he had strong actors to react with. Tokyo Joe doesn't give him much. Florence Marly is the love interest. She's beautiful, but so icy she could give your lips frostbite. Alexander Knox (Mark Landis), who competes for Florence Marly, was a fine actor, but always so civilized, often stuffy, sometimes weak.
What's it all about? Bogie as Joe Barrett returns to Tokyo right after fighting in the last good war to check on the gambling bar, Tokyo Joe's, which he used to own. He'd always felt Tokyo was his home. It's a sad homecoming. The woman he'd married, Trina Pechinkov (Marly), a White Russian émigré in Japan, he'd heard was dead. Instead, she'd been imprisoned. But now she's remarried to Occupation big shot Mark Landis...and she has a daughter. You guessed it, the child is Bogie's and he hadn't known. He wants Trina back. He hooks up with Baron Kimura (Sessue Hayakawa) to start a two-bit freight airline so he can stay in Tokyo and woo Trina away from Landis. From now on we're going to be in a world of deceit, the importing of Japanese war criminals back to Japan, of Bogart wearing a leather flight jacket, fist fights, bowing and ah so-ing, corny patriotic speeches, a precocious child who gets kidnapped...and sacrifice designed to bring a tear or two. The tension between Bogart and Alexander Knox is non-existent. So are the love sparks between Bogart and Marly. Sessue Hayakawa (who was a huge silent screen star in American movies) has a Japanese accent when he speaks his English lines that is so thick it's sometimes difficult to understand the full extent of the Baron's evil plans.
That leaves just Bogart to carry the film. He nearly does it...he wasn't Hollywood's most iconic movie star for nothing. (At best, the top icon probably would be a three-way tie with Bogart, Cary Grant and Mickey Mouse.) He even manages to make us forget the tyke he shares some scenes with. On balance, you'll enjoy Bogart, but Tokyo Joe is a movie to keep low on your list of Bogart movies to watch. The black and white DVD transfer looks very good.
Movie Review: A dispirited star melodrama...
Summary: 3 Stars
Bogart is a former nightclub owner who returns to postwar Japan to pick up his life with a wife (Florence Marly) he had deserted, only to find that she had remarried and was the mother of his seven-year-old daughter...
In the ensuing complications, Bogart is placed in a position where he must smuggle some Japanese war criminals back into Japan or his daughter will be killed...
Bogart is much less convincing than in his "Across the Pacific" days, where he was also required to deal with villainous Japanese...
For an actor who had belabored the point that he had been forced to do too many bad films because he had no control over the properties, it is disappointing to see him making extremely bad films now that he did have full control...
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