Review: Tokyo Joe (1949)
Bogey stars in this crime/noir film about a man doing his best to survive when all the world seems determined to grind him into the dirt. Tokyo Joe taps into the post-war frustrations that are synonymous with film noir. In the movie, Humphrey Bogart plays Joe Barrett, a former American Air Force colonel who has returned to Tokyo three years after World War II in hopes of running his old nightclub, Tokyo Joe's. There he discovers that his bar is now being watched over by his friend Ito (Teru Shimada, You Only Live Twice ) and that the wife (played by Florence Marly) he thought was dead is not only still alive, but has married someone else in his absence. To complicate things even further, an opportunity to smuggle goods on his freighter plane makes it seem as if crime is the only way to survive. With the odds stacked against him, Joe finds himself pushed further and further toward a life of moral compromise, stuck between unsympathetic authority figures and career crimin...
