Detective movies all, more or less, tell fish-out-of-water stories, their snooping protagonists pushed into unfamiliar terrain and forbidden from returning to where they started until they’ve found some clarity. Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955) doubles that sense of outsiderdom. It drops off its main character, an undercover American spy named Edward (Robert Stack), in Tokyo. He’s been flown there so that he can infiltrate and investigate a gang of expatriates led by Sandy (Robert Ryan), a racketeer perpetually followed by a cadre of disillusioned American servicemen that helps him organize and then execute various kinds of heists. Sandy’s strain of ruthlessness is most nastily encapsulated by his tendency to gun down a follower if they happen to be grievously injured enough during a job to slow things down.

Released during a period when Hollywood was becoming increasingly amenable to more meaningfully, if pretty imperfectly, expanding its cultural purview — No Way Out (1950), Carmen Jones (1954), Sayonara (1957), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Flower Drum Song (1961), to name a few — House of Bamboo near-immediately loses the narrative momentum prompted by a film-opening pair of interest-piquing incidents: a train robbery; the death of a white American man apparently shot by one of the same guns used during that robbery. He confesses on his deathbed to having, for the last two months, been married to a Japanese woman, Mariko (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) — a secret about which only his uncle knows. These plot strands are both, naturally, related to that aforementioned gang of expatriates. But the subsequent investigation, sneakily undertaken by Edward, is so uninvolving that it becomes disappointing that the movie’s first-act charge doesn’t lead somewhere else.

That’s not the fault of Ryan, always dependable as a scarily tough guy with an unmovingly furious mug, or Yamaguchi, about whom you grow to care the most compared with any of the other characters despite how underwritten and cooingly deferential-to-male-figures her part requires her to be. It’s solely Stack’s. His leaden, white-bread portrayal doesn’t just encourage you to not care very much what happens to him but barely register him at all, his predictable romance with Mariko generating not-even-lukewarm heat.

A recurring case for the detective movie, House of Bamboo’s faltering is made up — but not completely salvaged — by its atmosphere. But whereas the appeal of detective-movie ambiance usually lies in how bewitching it can make danger seem, what’s entrancing about Fuller’s movie isn’t anything like that but, rather, how beautiful it is to look at, Joseph MacDonald’s cinematography radiantly capturing Japan as it was still recovering from war. (The film, though, mostly sees the country through a foreigner’s lens, using it — and the stereotypically rendered people who live there — as an exotic background on which to project its narrative; Fuller’s usual cynical and progressive instincts are more trained on the post-war disenchantment of its antagonists.) The often unbearably wide CinemaScope technique is, for once, cannily used here. Our eyes want to roam the Tokyo streets and the film’s handsomely appointed sets; the immenseness of the frame seems to almost predict a curious viewer’s wandering eyes. House of Bamboo is, if nothing else, a visual feast.