Its story concerns Joe Barrett (Bogart), a war veteran returning to Tokyo Joe's, the Ginza gambling joint he ran in the years before Pearl Harbor. After reuniting with old pal/manager Ito (Teru Shimada), Joe learns that his presumed-dead girlfriend, a White Russian named Trina (Florence Marly), is not only alive but married to Mark Landis (Alexander Knox), a powerful businessman in the rebuilding of postwar Japan. Buried in a sea of red tape, Joe unwisely enlists the aid of militarist-turned-gang leader "Baron" Kimura (Sessue Hayakawa), who quickly blackmails Joe into fronting for an airfreight service intent on smuggling war criminals back into Japan.

One can readily see how Tokyo Joe's story would have appealed to both Santana and Columbia executives. Its Tokyo setting was exotic and the American Occupation of Japan made it timely and in the public mind. The film also bears more than a passing resemblance to the highly successful Casablanca (1942). Again Bogart plays an American expatriate who runs a casino/bar in a faraway land. An old flame, also a foreigner, walks back into his life and he gets depressed when he learns that she has married. He bargains with the local criminal element and his best friend is a non-white whom (unusual for the time) he regards as an equal.

Suffice to say Tokyo Joe is no Casablanca, and Florence Marly is especially a long way from Ingrid Bergman. Her icy features work against the character and were frankly put to far better use when she played the Queen of Blood for AIP. And while Alexander Knox seems to have been cast for no other reason than he resembled Paul Henreid, Landis's desire to help the Japanese people is nebulously stated at best. The screenwriters are especially ham-fisted with the love triangle itself, modeling it closely on Casablanca but completely missing its emotional realness. Instead, Knox and Bogart fight over Marly like some household pet caught in the middle of a messy divorce.

The Tokyo setting is purely window dressing, exotic only because an exotic locale was required. The film looks cheap, even though a second unit shot a fair amount of footage in Tokyo, then still recovering from having been bombed very nearly into nothingness. If Tokyo Joe had been made just five years later, Bogart and Marly might have joined them on location, but such is not the case. Instead, some dumb schlub in a trench coat and slouched hat wanders around Tokyo with his back to the camera pretending to be Bogart before director Stuart Heisler cuts to reverse angles of the real Bogie standing against a process screen. Had the film been made in the mid-1950s, real Japanese actors from that country's film industry might have been used, instead of marginally qualified types like Teru Shimada (You Only Live Twice). Even Hayakawa, despite his fame as a silent star, isn't up to the task, bringing name value and little else to his cliched inscrutable Oriental, complete with "Ah, so" dialogue.

Nevertheless, the film is competently made, and it's always fun to see Bogart playing his usual cynical, brooding antihero. The script is generally lousy, but at least the screenwriters knew how to write dialogue for the actor. Informed that B-29s had "converted" a nearby hotel "into a parking lot," Bogie responds, "It's a good thing they stopped when they did, or all of Tokyo would be a parking lot. Next time it'll be the whole world and nothing left to park."

Unexpectedly, Bogart's best scenes are opposite a seven-year-old girl. Though she is annoyingly precocious as children in movies usually are, his initial awkwardness and gradual affection for the child is played with a terrific blend of subtlety, tentativeness and, eventually, great warmth. The film is short on action, but does come alive in its unusually brutal climax, which likewise uses Bogart to good effect.

Video & Audio

Columbia/TriStar has been uneven with their 1930s/40s titles, but Tokyo Joe looks great. Except for some minor speckling, the image is crisp and free of damage, with very black blacks and good contrast. The mono sound is decent enough considering the film's age, and no less than eight subtitle options are offered: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai.

Extras

A four-minute montage of posters, lobby cards and the like from Bogart's Columbia titles is offered. This appears to be a carryover from the days of laserdiscs. The only other extra, if one wants to call it that, are a trio of trailers, though none for Tokyo Joe.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.