If you take a close look at this poster for the 1959 film The Crimson Kimono it’s clear that the filmmakers intended to explore racial themes, but it might not be obvious that this is a crime drama. That’s made clear in the first few minutes, during which a burlesque dancer played by Gloria Pall is shot dead in a street in the Little Tokyo area of Los Angeles. The case falls to odd couple cop buddies Glenn Corbett and James Shigeta. They live together, went to war together, joined the police force together, and now, working both their Anglo and Japanese connections, try to determine who murdered the dancer.
The main clue seems to be a painting that the gunman shot a hole in, so Corbett tracks down its artist, played by Victoria Shaw, who can perhaps identify the killer. She’s beautiful, so Corbett duly falls for her, and it seems as if she likes him too—until she meets Shigeta. So you end up with a crime drama built around a biracial love triangle. To say this was forward thinking for the era is certainly accurate, though similar ideas had made it to the screen earlier, for example in 1957’s Island in the Sun.
As the investigation progresses, it becomes clear that Shaw, as the only person that may be able identify the killer, is in danger. She’s removed from the USC sorority house where she lives and taken into protective custody, watched over by both Corbett and Shigeta, as well as the helpful Anna Lee, who plays a fellow painter. It’s during this section that Shigeta and Shaw make their connection. They keep it from Corbett at first—they can’t immediately bring themselves to tell him how they feel about each other. But it will come out eventually, and explosively.
The Crimson Kimono is technically sharp. Its scenes are tightly edited together and connected by punctuative bits of alternately jazzy and orchestral soundtrack, and one or two snippets of cleverly diegetic music. But there are problems. Director Samuel Fuller, who also wrote the screenplay, wanted Shigeta to be oblivious to his differences in the eyes of others, setting up a revelatory change where he suddenly believes people have seen and judged him by his non-whiteness all along. To portray this, Fuller gives Shigeta an earthy eloquence meant to underscore his all-Americanness for audiences:
“I never felt this in the army, in the police. Maybe it’s five thousand years of blood behind me busting to the front. For the first time I feel different. I taste it right through every bone inside me.”
That’s difficult dialogue, certainly dramatic, but also unrealistic, in our view. Shigeta does what he can with it and for that deserves credit, but we can’t say we loved his performance. In the end, though, the movie has two goals and accomplishes both. One is to use the subculture and setting of Little Tokyo to enliven a typical detective thriller, but the more important purpose is to explore the possibilities and complications of Anglo-Japanese romance. Just a quick note on that: the otherwise excellent website AFI.com keywords plotlines like these as “miscegenation.” That word was invented for usage in a racist 1863 propaganda pamphlet and is deliberately meant to make something natural sound ugly and wrong. AFI and other websites have no business using it, continuing the mission of dead racists.
But getting back to the movie, there’s one other flaw. Fuller takes the easy way out by making Shigeta’s demons entirely self-invented. The people around him aren’t racist. He just thinks they are. That’s a nice salve for movie audiences, but it’s a message incompatible with an American reality where, at the time, one third of states had laws against interracial marriage. Fuller had already directed 1955’s Japanese-themed House of Bamboo, and was known to love Japanese culture. The Crimson Kimono, while not totally successful, was born of good intentions. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1959.
