Showing posts with label Melodrama Noir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Melodrama Noir. Show all posts

Tokyo Joe (1949)

Tokyo Joe (1949) is a post-war returning veteran smuggler film noir crime film directed by Stuart Heisler and starring Humphrey Bogart. 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.

The returning veteran noir never had a better twist as the return is made to the defeated country, which is Japan. After spending World War II in the Air Force, ex-Colonel Joe Barrett returns to Tokyo to see if there is anything left of his pre-war bar and gambling joint, Tokyo Joe's.

Amazingly, it is more or less intact and being run by his old friend Ito. Joe is shocked to learn from Ito that his wife Trina, whom he thought had died in the war, is still alive. She has divorced Joe and is married to Mark Landis, a lawyer working in the American occupation of Japan. She has a seven-year-old child named Anya.