Tokyo Joe (1949)

Almost all films noir benefit from repeat viewings, and that is especially true of Tokyo Joe. Some slang used in the film probably will be unfamiliar to modern viewers, but a little bit of history information is the biggest help. I did a bit of research before seeing the film again, and that made a difference. But historical fact is not the reason to see Tokyo Joe because it is really a poignant story of trying to mend broken relationships after a protracted world war.

Humphrey Bogart, starring as Joe Barrett, gets top billing, but that shouldn’t be a surprise because the film was produced by his own production company: Santana Pictures Corporation. And Bogart is definitely the star, the lead, the actor who carries the film. Many of the other actors were unfamiliar to me. Even Bogart’s female lead, Florence Marly, as Trina Landis, was not familiar. I did wonder if she did her own singing in Tokyo Joe because her portrayal in the nightclub sure looked like she was using her singing muscles, so to speak. I couldn’t find anything specific about that, but I did learn from Wikipedia that Marly dreamed of being an opera singer, so I believe my hunch is correct.

The film starts with aerial shots over Tokyo and eventually camera shots from a plane. Barrett is one of the passengers on the plane that lands at Haneda Airforce Base. Postwar Japan is under U.S. military rule, and Barrett is checked in at the airport by a U.S. military officer who informs him that he will have to check in at the Provost Marshall’s in Tokyo. When Barrett leaves the base, the officer calls in Barrett’s passport number to a Colonel Dahlgren. Barrett heads next to the Provost Marshall and checks in, as required, and the major in this office also calls in Barrett’s passport number. The military is keeping tabs on Barrett from the beginning and, because this is film noir, viewers can assume that his arrival in Japan may be cause for suspicion.

Barrett is back in Tokyo to salvage his old business: A cabaret (what he calls “a joint”) called Cabaret Tokyo Joe. Ito, a friend and business partner of Joe’s from before the war, is still at the nightclub, which is now being managed by Japanese. Ito is very hesitant with Joe at first because Joe is American, from the conquering country, but he finally thaws after a friendly kudo fight with Joe, and they renew their friendship.

(This article about Tokyo Joe contains spoilers.)

Ito wants Joe to live in the apartment over Tokyo Joe’s, like old times. He tells Barrett that his old girlfriend Trina is still alive and that she is in Tokyo. Barrett is thrilled; one of the reasons he returned to Japan was to find Trina, but his first meeting with her at her home doesn’t go according to his plan. He learns that she has married. In fact, she has remarried because Trina and Joe had been married before the war, before he was drafted. Trina divorced Joe after the war without ever telling him because she didn’t know where he was, and married Mark Landis. Trina tells Joe that her new husband, Mark Landis, works for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP).

Barrett’s visitor’s pass is good for only sixty days, and he intends to win Trina back in that time. But he realizes he faces a large obstacle in Mark Landis, and it is quite possible that he will need more than a couple of months. Barrett decides he needs a business to provide him with a good reason to remain in Japan. He goes to Baron Kimaru, underworld crime figure and former head of the Japanese secret police. Already viewers can see that trouble is in store for Barrett in Japan; he seems to be running into trouble everywhere he turns.

Joe wants to start an airline franchise: He can do so because he is a U.S. citizen and is an experienced fighter pilot, but he has no money. Baron Kimura has money, but martial law prevents Japanese citizens from engaging in businesses that are considered vital or sensitive for Allied security. Barrett strikes a deal with Kimura: He’ll fly and Kimura will handle the administrative details. Barrett also gets assurances about transporting only goods like frozen frogs between Seoul, Korea, and Tokyo.

Barrett gets nothing but bureaucratic red tape from the military about his airline permit, which he needs before he can go into business with Kimura. Barrett goes to Kimura to discuss his administrative troubles. Kimura has held on to files from the Japanese secret police, and he thinks one in particular will interest Joe. Joe reads it, but viewers don’t know yet what is in the file. Joe worries that it could be a forgery; he knows the Japanese were good at that kind of thing. But Kimura tells him to ask Mrs. Landis about the information in the file.

And Barrett does just that. Trina Landis tells Joe that she spent the war in a prison camp, and it is true that she worked for the Japanese broadcasting propaganda to U.S. GIs. Joe reminds her that she was a naturalized citizen married to a U.S. citizen in wartime, and what she did was treason. But while Trina was in prison, she gave birth to a baby girl, and the Japanese used her baby as a bargaining chip to get her to work for them. To save her daughter, she did what the Japanese asked her to do. Joe surmises that most jurors wouldn’t convict Trina when she faced this kind of coercion, but he also thinks that he can use the information to ruin Mark’s chances working for SCAP and get Trina back. But then Joe learns that Trina’s daughter Anya is his, not Mark’s.

Joe now wants to back out of his business deal with Kimura because he wants to protect Trina and their daughter. But Kimura turns the blackmail on Joe. Kimura tells Joe that the secret files on Trina Landis will be used one way or the other. Joe threatens Kimura, but Kimura tells him that if he dies, the files would stay with people who can use them. Joe is backed into a corner.

Joe Barrett goes to Mark Landis, literally with his hat in his hand, because he needs help cutting through army red tape, which Mark can do because he works for SCAP. Mark agrees to help him, and Nippon-American Air Freight is finally off the ground. Joe and Ito are back in business, a different business, but trouble continues to plague Barrett. They have no proof, but they are still worried about working with Kimura, a known gangster, and that the airline is a front for a smuggling business.

Colonel Dahlgren and now General Ireton want to work with Barrett. They already know that he is fronting for a criminal organization. They also know before he does that this organization plans to bring back three Japanese war criminals from Korea. Joe may be cutting corners where he can, but he is a patriot. He doesn’t need too much convincing to do what needs to be done to thwart Baron Kimura’s plans. Kimura knows this about Joe, too. For added insurance that his smuggling scheme will work, he has his henchmen kidnap Anya.

Trina, of course, is sick with worry about the safety of her daughter. The predicament just adds to the pressure on Joe, who comes through and saves Anya. By the end of the film, viewers see Joe as a hero: He came through when Trina and Mark Landis really needed to count on him. Mark came through—very graciously—when Joe needed help.

It seems that both Mark and Joe were heroes, in very different ways, when they needed to be. I wonder if that was the message of the film in 1949 because Mark was not cast as the bad guy, standing in Joe’s way. The Japanese characters in the film were portrayed as bad guys for the most part. But Joe still kept his friendship with Ito after the war. Ito commits hari-kari by the end of the film, however, because he feels ashamed about convincing Joe to return to Japan. Joe has the time, while Ito is in his death throes, to give a short patriotic, political speech to Ito about the glorious Allied goals of postwar reconstruction for Japan before Ito collapses. The film isn’t entirely free from a bit of propaganda. But as I already pointed out, Tokyo Joe is a poignant story about people trying to mend broken relationships after a protracted world war, and it succeeds at telling that story.

Filmgoers in 1949 would have been familiar with many of the terms and the postwar political developments overseas, but modern-day viewers could probably benefit from some research. I know I did. Here are some helpful links:

◊ Wikipedia provides a basic overview of the U.S. occupation of postwar Japan.

◊ SCAP = Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, which was created at the start of the occupation of Japan on August 14, 1945.

◊ SCAP was headquartered in the Dai Ichi Sogo Building in Tokyo. The characters refer to it at various points throughout the film. Baron Kimura knows that Joe Barrett met with Allied officers simply because he was seen entering the Dai Ichi Building.

◊ It was very difficult to hear the dialogue sometimes in Tokyo Joe, and the DVD I watched did not come with subtitles. I think Trina said Oeyama or Okayama Prison Camp when she talked to Joe about what she did in Japan during the war. For a list of prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in Japan, see the website “Alphabetical Listing of POW Camps in Japan Proper.” The website says that the list is not updated, but it was still helpful for a rookie like me when it comes to wartime Japan.

As I said, historical accuracy is not the reason to see Tokyo Joe. It is a great story that I just happened to enjoy more when I learned about some of the facts discussed by the characters. And the three leads are not one-dimensional. Joe shows his ugly side when he is intent on winning Trina back, but he saves Anya in the end. Mark is naturally hostile to Joe when he first shows up at the Landis house, but he is gracious enough to give Joe a chance at a business in Japan. And Trina did what she could to save her daughter during the war, even if it meant a charge of treason when the war was over. To say that the war complicated these characters’ lives in every way imaginable would be an understatement. World War II touched the lives of millions of people, and a film like Tokyo Joe shows how this happens to Joe, Mark, Trina, and Ito.

November 1949 release date  •  Directed by Stuart Heisler  •  Screenplay by Walter Doniger, Cyril Hume Bertram Millhauser  •  Based on a story by Steve Fisher  •  Music by George Antheil  •  Edited by Viola Lawrence  •  Cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr.

Humphrey Bogart as Joseph (Joe) Barrett  •  Alexander Knox as Mark Landis  •  Florence Marly as Trina Pechinkov Landis  •  Sessue Hayakawa as Baron Kimura  •  Jerome Courtland as Danny, pilot  •  Gordon Jones as Idaho, pilot  •  Teru Shimada as Ito  •  Hideo Mori as Kanda  •  Charles Meredith as General Ireton  •  Rhys Williams as Colonel Dahlgren  •  Lora Lee Michel as Anya, Trina’s daughter  •  Kyoko Kamo as Nani-San  •  Gene Gondo as Kamikaze  •  Whit Bissell as Captain Winnow  •  Harold Goodwin as Major J. F. X. Loomis  •  James Cardwell as a military police captain  •  Frank Kumagai as the truck driver  •  Tetsu Komai as Lieutenant General Takenobu (aka “The Butcher”)  •  Otto Han as Hara  •  Yosan Tsuruta as Goro  •  Hugh Beaumont as the provost marshal major

Distributed by Columbia Pictures  •  Produced by Santana Pictures Corporation

The Dark Corner (1946): The Eightieth Anniversary of the Film’s Premiere

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the premiere of The Dark Corner, and I’ll take all good reasons to see the film again. I wrote about The Dark Corner in September 2025 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of my blog. My very first blog article—in 2015—was about The Dark Corner. It’s a film I can see again and again and never tire of it.

The following list shows three blog articles that I have written about The Dark Corner. Click on each list item below to read more about the film:

◊ The Dark Corner (1946)

◊ Four Favorite Noirs: Born to Kill (1947), The Dark Corner (1946), Marlowe (1969), and Too Late for Tears (1949)

◊ Ten Years of Film Noir at Make Mine Film Noir, and It All Started in The Dark Corner (1946)

Kathleen Stuart (played by Lucille Ball) is a secretary working for Brad Galt (played by Mark Stevens). Galt is a San Francisco transplant hoping to start a new life working as a private investigator in New York City. He is haunted by his past. His former business partner in San Francisco framed him for an auto accident that wasn’t his fault. Now, in New York City, someone is using this information against him to commit murder and pin the crime on him. The story starts with a mysterious stranger following Kathleen and Brad on their first date. Kathleen is in love with her boss, and she is willing to help him clear his name.

The start of the baseball season in the United States is barely two weeks old, so I will say again that Kathleen Stuart uses a running baseball metaphor to describe the start of her courtship with Brad Galt. It’s a metaphor she brings up more than once. The on-screen chemistry works so well between Kathleen and Brad, and one of the reasons for that is because it’s not long into the story before Brad is embellishing the metaphor, too.

For example, after one of their first dates, Brad brings Kathleen to the front door of her apartment building and expresses disappointment when she makes it clear that she won’t be inviting him up. He insists that he is thirsty and in need of a glass of water, but Kathleen stands firm: “There you go again, pitching low and outside.” Brad reluctantly agrees to leave and goes back down the steps of the front stoop. On the sidewalk at the bottom of the stairs, he gives the “safe” sign. (It’s hard to see in the photo below, but that is Brad giving the “safe” sign in front of Kathleen’s apartment building.)

The “safe” sign wasn’t obvious to everyone apparently. I bring up this particular example because it wasn’t obvious to James Ursini. In the DVD commentary for The Dark Corner provided by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Ursini admits that he didn’t know what Brad was doing when he saw the film for the first time. He says something along the lines of “Here we have the double entendre stuff, with baseball and umps, when he [Brad] does his little routine being safe. [pause] Or does that mean ‘out’?” Silver tells him that Ursini was right the first time.

I was surprised by this because I thought everyone knew the sign for “safe” in baseball. It’s my favorite sport, but I am not the most dedicated fan and follow it intermittently, and even I knew what Brad was trying to do. But the truth is that you don’t need to know anything about baseball to enjoy The Dark Corner.

If you haven’t seen the film yet, you have something to look forward to—whether or not you know anything at all about baseball. I remember how much I enjoyed The Dark Corner the first time I saw it (really every time I see it). I cannot recommend it enough.

Have I seen the film eighty times? No, not even close. But I am working on it!

April 9, 1946, release date  •  Directed by Henry Hathaway  •  Screenplay by Bernard C. Schoenfeld and Jay Dratler •  Based on a story by Leo Rosten  •  Music by Cyril J. Mockridge  •  Edited by J. Watson Webb, Jr.  •  Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald

Lucile Ball as Kathleen Stuart  •  Mark Stevens as Bradford Galt  •  Clifton Webb as Hardy Cathcart  •  William Bendix as Stauffer, alias Fred Foss, White Suit  •  Kurt Kreuger as Anthony Jardine  •  Cathy Downs as Mari Cathcart  •  Reed Hadley as Lieutenant Frank Reeves  •  Constance Collier as Mrs. Kingsley  •  Eddie Heywood as himself, playing with his orchestra  •  Molly Lamont as Lucy Wilding  •  Ellen Corby as the maid

Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox  •  Produced by Twentieth Century Fox

M (1951): The Remake

This 1951 version of M is a remake of the 1931 German film starring Peter Lorre, and David Wayne was brave to take on a role that made Lorre famous. But he does a good job of playing the lead, a child murderer named Martin Harrow. The male leads are not the only reasons to make comparisons.

The 1931 version very effectively portrayed a man tormented by his demons and who had been hospitalized before his killing spree. It also portrayed the arguments for and against capital punishment, which were debated in Germany at the time the film was produced, in much more detail compared to the remake. In contrast to the original film, which did not mention any police brutality, the 1951 remake depicts a Los Angeles police detective willing to use violence to get what he needs from suspects. The only check on this detective in the 1951 film is his superior, who has to keep reminding his subordinate not to go overboard.

The 1931 film was set in Berlin in the interwar period, between World Wars I and II. The 1951 remake is set in the now-demolished neighborhood of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. Both films use their locations to orient the narratives in very specific ways. The 1931 film also relies on current events to fill out background information, which gives the film a lot more coherence, although this isn’t always obvious to U.S. audiences today. It’s hard to compete with a film that made Peter Lorre a star, and Lorre isn’t the only reason for that.

The 1951 remake of M is available free online. Click here to see it at the Internet Archive. Click here to see my article about the original 1931 film, and click here to read about Jim Dawson’s book about the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The 1951 film starts with two women approaching and then boarding the Angel’s Flight car in the neighborhood of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles. Bundles of newspapers are piled at the end of the small platform, all with the headline “Child Killer Sought.” Another man dressed in a suit and white fedora runs and jumps onto the car. As the car pulls away, the man in the suit leans forward into the opening of the car and looks out at the view of Los Angeles spread out below the hills.

The opening credits appear over various shots of young children who have been abducted and killed. (1) A young girl at a vending machine is approached by the man from the Angel’s Flight car, the one in the suit. (I noticed that the candy machine includes modern-day candy bars: Butterfinger, Hershey’s, and Baby Ruth! Me? A sweet tooth?) (2) The man then goes to an amusement park and helps a young girl at a water fountain. (3)  Then he watches a young girl drawing with chalk on a sidewalk. (4) Next, he stands on the boardwalk at a beach and watches a young girl there take off her shoes so she can play in the sand. After she runs onto the beach, he picks up her shoes.

The narrative starts after the credits with the man in the suit, Martin Harrow, getting his shoes shined and watching, from inside the shop window, two children cross the street toward the storefront. He gets up as they get closer. He spots Elsie Coster, his fifth murder victim, who crosses the street while bouncing a ball. The man goes outside and picks up the ball when it gets away from her, then takes her hand and offers to lead her home.

The girl’s mother, Mrs. Coster, sets a table for lunch in a small apartment. The film cuts abruptly to a screaming mannequin at an amusement park (it is the same mannequin from Woman on the Run), which is very jarring and very effective because viewers are expecting something bad to happen at any moment, but they are not expecting a screaming mannequin. Harrow and Elsie approach a blind balloon seller, and Harrow buys a ballon for the girl. Then he whistles and plays a pipe. The pipe seems to be a link to Harrow’s mood and inclination to kill, although the reasons for this are not entirely clear.

Mrs. Coster becomes frantic when Elsie doesn’t come home with her two neighbors, the first two children who crossed the street in front of the shoeshine shop. Viewers know that Elsie came to harm when her balloon floats into the sky over some tenements in Bunker Hill and when her ball rolls into a pile of trash.

This cutting back and forth between Mrs. Coster waiting for her daughter to come home for lunch and Martin Harrow selecting Elsie Coster as his next victim follows the 1931 original very closely. Most of the remake is remarkably similar in structure and narrative form, but there are some important differences. For instance, the abrupt cut to the screaming mannequin creates a sudden burst of tension, but the original 1931 film is more effective at building the tension of its story at a steady pace.

(This article about M, the 1951 remake, contains spoilers.)

I already mentioned that one of the Los Angeles detectives, Lieutenant Becker, favors violence to get what he wants from suspects. Police brutality is not a feature of the original German film, and viewers don’t see Lieutenant Becker put any of his ideas into action, but that’s because his superior, Inspector Carney, is always there to remind him of citizens’ rights. Becker mentions his proclivities so often that I wondered what he would do if Inspector Carney weren’t around to keep him in check. At one point during their investigation into the murders, Inspector Carney says to Becker that the killer could be a professor, a storekeeper, and with a pointed look at Becker, “maybe even a cop.”

When the police conduct one of their many raids on known sites of illegal activity in Bunker Hill, Lieutenant Becker says that he can shut everyone up so that they can conduct their interviews. Inspector Carney warns him to take it easy. Later, when the police consult a psychologist about recent releases of psychiatric patients who could be potential murder suspects, Becker is not happy with the interviewing methods and testing used by the psychologist:

• Inspector Carney: “You got a better way?”

• Lieutenant Becker: “Yeah. A dark room and a rubber hose and about a half dozen cops.”

• Inspector Carney: “The courts don’t like it that way.”

• Lieutenant Becker: “Yeah, that’s just the trouble. We need less courts and more cops. . . .”

This is one feature of the remake that resonates today, but for different reasons.

Inspector Carney is definitely the more philosophical of the two. When he finds Police Chief Regan being pressured by the mayor to find a suspect and resolve the case, he says, “The ordinary murder, you look for a dame or a bank book. Got a victim with no enemies. . . . What are we looking for? A man with a twisted mind. Could be anybody.” This same dilemma came up in the original film, too: No one seemed to know what kind of criminal they were looking for.

Jim Backus plays the role of the mayor in the remake, and his performance made his one big scene seem like comic relief. I don’t think this can be blamed on modern viewers, myself included, who know Backus’s starring role in the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island. I don’t know if it was the filmmakers’ intentions, but the shift in tone was jarring in a film about the police pursuit of a child murderer. In the original, there never was such a break in the seriousness of the subject matter, and the consistency in tone worked much better.

The original 1931 film also spent more time than the 1951 remake on the pros and cons of capital punishment. Both Hans Beckert, Peter Lorre’s character, and his mock defense counsel at the trial staged by the criminal elements of Berlin near the end of the film discuss why Beckert should not have to face the death penalty. Beckert cannot be held accountable for his actions if he is insane and therefore not criminally liable. But in the remake, Inspector Carney only alludes to this issue. When he reports what he and Lieutenant Becker found at Harrow’s apartment to Chief Regan, he says:

• Inspector Carney: “. . . We’ll pick him up, but then what? Back to the booby hatch? Man like Harrow should never have been released in the first place. Hospitals so understaffed, they free dangerous men.”

• Police Chief Regan: “Well, he won’t get out this time. He’ll burn.”

• Inspector Carney: “That’s right, [more loudly as Police Chief Regan leaves his office] That’s right. [to himself, with doubt in his voice] That’ll fix everything.”

Another issue I couldn’t help noticing in the remake was the lack of search warrants. Lieutenant Becker poses as a health department official to talk to Harrow at his boarding house. Harrow isn’t home, but the landlady allows Becker to wait in Harrow’s room, and Becker does a search of the room while he is waiting. Becker doesn’t produce a search warrant for the landlady, but even if he had one, he has already claimed to be a health department official, not a police officer. He doesn’t find anything related to the murder case in his initial search, but when he and Inspector Carney return to Harrow’s room later to conduct another search, they eventually find Harrow’s stash of children’s shoes hidden in his closet. This search yielded evidence, but would it have been admissible without a search warrant in 1950s Los Angeles?

I wish that I could have found this film on a DVD that came with audio commentary. I would have loved to hear some historical context in relation to both the Bunker Hill neighborhood and police practices. I enjoyed the film more than I thought I would, but it is no match for the 1931 original. Maybe that’s partly because I saw it first, but the original treated its subject matter with the right level of seriousness and kept this tone throughout. I bet the remake could have deleted the mayor’s character altogether!

March 1951 release date  •  Directed by Joseph Losey  •  Screenplay by Norman Reilly Raine, Leo Katcher, Waldo Salt  •  Remake of M (1931), starring Peter Lorre, directed by Fritz Lang  •  Music by Michel Michelet  •  Edited by Edward Mann  •  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo

David Wayne as Martin W. Harrow  •  Howard Da Silva as Inspector Carney  •  Luther Adler as Dan Langley  •  Martin Gabel as Charlie Marshall  •  Steve Brodie as Police Lieutenant Becker  •  Raymond Burr as Pottsy  •  Glenn Anders as Riggert  •  Karen Morley as Mrs. Coster  •  Norman Lloyd as Sutro  •  John Miljan as the blind balloon vender  •  Walter Burke as MacMahan  •  Roy Engel as Police Chief Regan  •  Benny Burt as Jansen  •  Leonard Bremen as Lemke  •  Jim Backus as the mayor  •  Janine Perreau as the last little girl  •  Frances Karath as the little girl in the hallway  •  Robin Fletcher as Elsie Coster  •  Bernard Szold as the Bradbury Building security guard  •  Jorja Curtright as Mrs. Stewart  •  William Schallert as the last Rorschach test taker

Distributed by Columbia Pictures  •  Produced by Superior Pictures