Six minutes into House of Bamboo, a noir film shot in postwar Japan, you will find an image that perfectly captures the genius of its director, Samuel Fuller. The sequence leading to the image: A train cuts across the Japanese countryside. We see peasants working in the freezing cold. The train pulls three cars, one of which is guarded by an American and a Japanese soldier. Suddenly, the train is forced to stop. A peasant with a dumb ox is blocking the tracks. As the train operator yells at the peasant to get out of the way, he is attacked from behind by a masked man. Other masked men with guns appear and surround the train. There is a shoot-out. The American soldier is hit, rolls down the snow-covered hill, and dies. The masked men remove crates from the train's cars, load them onto a truck, and drive off. A peasant woman comes across the dead American soldier and screams. Dramatic music fills the screen.

After a title sequence, the cops investigate the crime scene. An American security officer and a Japanese detective share information. While mulling over a confusing detail, cut to the unforgettable image: The camera is angled in such a way that we see snow on the ground, the black soles of the dead man's shoes, and Mount Fuji. Indeed, the mountain is positioned exactly between the shoes—its peak almost rising from their skyward tips. Anyone who has watched Fuller's films (Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss) knows this is exactly how his mind works. The image is at once ridiculous, impressive, funny, sinister, shameless, shocking, sad, and beautiful. And this crazy mixture defines the rest of the film—a white man slapping a geisha, the murder in the bamboo tub, the ending on the "flying-saucer-like carousel perched on a rooftop high above the city" (Richard Brody). Fuller's cinematic imagination has no couth. Northwest Film Forum, Jan 13–19.