Tokyo Joe is a 1949 film directed by Stuart Heisler from a story by Steve Fisher, adapted by Walter Doniger and starring Humphrey Bogart, Florence Marly and Sessue Hayakawa. This was Heisler's first of two features starring Bogart, the other was Chain Lightning that also wrapped in 1949 but was held up in release until 1950.
After World War II, ex-serviceman Joe Barrett (Humphrey Bogart) returns to Tokyo, to see if there's anything left of his pre-war bar and gambling joint ("Tokyo Joe's") after all the bombing. Amazingly, it is more or less intact and being run by his old friend Ito (Teru Shimada). He is also shocked to learn from Ito that his wife Trina (Florence Marly), whom he thought had died in the war, is in fact still very much alive. She has remarried, to American diplomat Mark Landis (Alexander Knox), and has a seven-year-old child, Anya (Lora Lee Michel).
Barrett starts up an air freight business. One of his customers, underworld boss Baron Kimura (Sessue Hayakawa), wants him to smuggle war criminals into the country in order to organize an anti-American Communist movement. When he balks, those nearest and dearest to Joe get caught up in the ensuing struggle.
The film was Sessue Hayakawa's first postwar project and served as a revitalization of his career. From 1937 to 1949, Hayakawa had been in France, first as an actor and then was caught up in the German occupation, living ostensibly as an artist, selling watercolors. After joining the French underground, he aided Allied flyers during the war. When Humphrey Bogart's production company tracked him down to offer him a role in Tokyo Joe, before issuing a work permit, the American Consulate investigated Hayakawa's activities during the war, and cleared his way to work on the film.
Principal filming for Tokyo Joe took place from January 4 to the end of February 1949 on the Columbia Pictures studio lot, not on location in Tokyo, Japan. A second photographic unit was dispatched by Columbia to Tokyo to collect exterior scene shots and was the first movie company allowed to film in postwar Japan. The use of a Lockheed Hudson bomber converted into cargo hauling is featured with both interiors, and aerial sequences revolving around the aircraft.
The film fared well with the public as the subject of post-war Japan was an intriguing one featured in many of the headlines of the day. Most viewers were convinced that the film was a semi-documentary due to the extensive use of footage shot in Japan. The critics were less charitable, the contemporary New York Times review noted the juxtaposition of the footage as jarring: "...a note of reality which is embarrassingly at odds with the major and markedly synthetic elements of the plot", further stating: "The big weakness of 'Tokyo Joe,' however, is a script which does not neatly come together, but squanders its good points amidst a field of corn."
Humphrey Bogart's lesser films are so often passed by because the standard for Bogart films is so incredibly high. Is this film as great as "To Have and Have Not"? No it isn't. On the other hand, it is more sophisticated and interesting to watch than a lot of films that Hollywood churns out year after year.
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