493/ C'est pas parce qu'on a rien à dire qu'il faut fermer sa gueule... (Jacques Besnard 1975)25/12/2013
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There are two maps in the film. One is important to the plot, the other not at all. The first is given to Slaughter by a police officer who wants him to burgle a gangster's safe. The map is then shown by Slaughter to the former safe-cracker (now pimp) with whom he will carry out the burglary: The details of the map are either too feint or too distant to be readable, but it is anyway the idea of the map that counts for the story. The other map is readable, and is presumably of Los Angeles (where the film is set and shot), but it serves only as establishing décor in an office where the gangster's takings (from prostitution, gambling etc.) are being added up: This map can be seen in the background when Slaughter launches his one-man revenge attack at the climax of the film: A plot premise of House of Bamboo is the cooperation of Tokyo police and U.S. military in the investigation of a crime. The offices of each set of investigators are returned to regularly in the film, and each space has its own maps of the Tokyo area: Parallels are drawn with the criminals responsible, who are shown planning a robbery with military meticulousness and maps (the gang is made up of former U.S. servicemen): Later, the same criminals are ahown planning a further robbery in the Ginza district by means of this improvised map: This plan is transcribed by an undercover police agent, and his hand-drawn map is passed to the U.S. military investigators: The film's famous climax at a rooftop amusement park overlooking Tokyo features a turning globe as attraction, combining overt cartographic symbolism with intertextual echoes of The Third Man and White Heat ('Top of of the world, Ma'):
- Do you have a Michelin map of the area? - Just behind you. - Where are we exactly? - At Meursault-L’Hôpital. - What’s the road? - The D.23. (…) - Set up roadblocks on all the routes, including between Arney-le-Duc, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Beaune, Chalon-sur Saône, Le Creusot, Autun. I’m at the level crossing at Meursault-L’Hôpital, it cuts across the D.23, that’s right. The escape of a prisoner from a train is followed by this close scrutiny of the surrounding area on a road map. A sense of identifiable location is very strong, especially with all those names of classic Burgundies. The other maps are conventional for such a film. In contrast to Rififi (this film's pre-text, see here), we hardly get a glimpse of the map used in the heist: At police headquarters there is a map of Paris in one office, and in another room a set of maps of specific districts:
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