Lost Classics: ‘The Crimson Kimono’
August 24, 2007
In honor of the Nisei Week Festival last week in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, I’m taking a look back at a classic Hollywood “B-movie” that uses the festival as its backdrop: director Sam Fuller’s 1959 noir thriller The Crimson Kimono. When it comes to portrayals of Asian Pacific American men on the silver screen, this may be the best to ever come out of Hollywood.
The story is straight out of pulp fiction heaven: Japanese American actor James Shigeta (Flower Drum Song) is a Nisei detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, and his best friend is fellow detective Glenn Corbett, a Caucasian. The two are called to investigate the murder of a stripper, and they meet a beautiful white woman, played by Victoria Shaw, who appears to hold the key to solving the case. Both men fall in love with Shaw — which creates tension, racial and otherwise, between the two friends — leading to the action-packed climax set in Little Tokyo during the Nisei Week parade.
What was most revolutionary about the film in 1959 Hollywood is, sadly, still revolutionary today. Shaw realizes that the man she truly loves is Shigeta and chooses him over the Caucasian rival. The final image is of Shigeta and Shaw sharing a passionate kiss with the parade in the background. If showing a white woman pick an Asian man over a white one was unheard of in 1950s America, then to see an Asian man locking lips with a white woman must have been downright scandalous.
Even today, when you see an Asian leading man like Chow Yun Fat or Jet Li star opposite a Caucasian woman in a Hollywood film, rarely is there any overt sexuality or even so much as a chaste kiss. So how did The Crimson Kimono get away with it almost fifty years ago?
Director/writer Sam Fuller had an interest in Asian and Asian American culture that went beyond the usual exoticism. Whether it was in a film like The Steel Helmet, where a nisei soldier in the Korean War grapples with the issue of being a Japanese American and fighting for a country that interned his community, or the non-traditional casting of Korean American actor Philip Ahn as an “all-American” psychiatrist in Shock Corridor, many of Fuller’s movies are peopled with three-dimensional Asian (American) characters rare for that time.
The idea for Shigeta’s character came from a real-life nisei detective that Fuller was familiar with. By 1959, Fuller had earned a reputation for making low-budget movies that became box office successes. When Fuller pitched Crimson Kimono to then head of Columbia Pictures Harry Cohn, a shocked Cohn lectured Fuller about why such a film couldn’t be made, how middle America wasn’t ready and that it would fail at the box office.
But to his credit, Cohn gave the film a greenlight. As conservative as Hollywood was (and is), Cohn belonged to the first wave of mavericks who ran the studios (others included Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner) and were willing to stick their necks out on the line to make a picture of quality, even if the box office prospects looked dim (and The Crimson Kimono was not a box office success).
The film is not without its detractors. In Gina Marchetti’s book Romance and the “Yellow Peril,” she writes that the movie seems to deny “that racism exists anywhere, except in the deluded minds of its victim,” referring to the fact that Shigeta attaches a racial component to the tension that develops between him and his friend, but which portrayed as being largely self-created.
Unfortunately, the film has yet to be officially released on video or DVD, but it’s well worth the effort to seek out.
Philip W. Chung is a writer and co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble. Lodestone’s next production of the classic Greek drama The Trojan Women runs through Aug. 26 in L.A. For more info: myspace.com/trojanwomen2007. His new play, My Man Kono, about the relationship between Toraichi Kono and Charlie Chaplin, will be read at the Ford Amphitheatre on Aug. 25 at 1 p.m. www.fordtheatres.org
Comments
4 Responses to “Lost Classics: ‘The Crimson Kimono’”
Got something to say?
I am deeply impressed with the author’s research, and wish I were back in L.A. to savor his work.
But, by 1950, my relatively brief tenure at the Los Angeles Daily News as second-string film/drama critic/columnist had already been shot down in the wake of the Hollywood Ten and “fellow travellers.”
But what I want to append here is the fact, well, my own experience that is, that whereas racism then was much like racism is today, there were also more than a few individuals in Hollywood who gave the lie to that perception.
In my case, my editor, Virginia Wright, and the late, great American dance innovator, Lester Horton.
And I remind my peers that there is also such a thing as reverse racism, for EVERYone.
And that the righteous path is to take each person as an individual first. Samuel Fuller or Harry Cohn.
Frank Eng
I love this film and i think it was extremely revolutionary for its time. In addition, the film shows Japanese people as normal people, i mean, they look like us, they are not exotic human beings showing exotic customs. And i have to say that i fell in love with Victoria Shaw when i saw this movie for the first time. What a woman, boy!!
Okay, guys:
Forget about “lost classics.”
Or beddable beauties.
The bulletin today for ALL Bay Area residents is:
NANCY PELOSI IS A CLOSET REPUBLICAN.
P.S.: She’s also hopelessly Gollywood redux
.P.P.S.: Hey, Jerry, here’s your chance. To “redeem” yourself, and set up a nonprofit foundation to underwrite a new version of AsianWeek that is editorially free of constraints and restraints and answerable ONLY to the public weal. With Dr. George Koo as editor, Phil Chung as arts critic, Phil Tajitsu=Nash as political pundit, Andrew Lam as correspondent at large, and “Linda” as the arbiter of women’s issues.
Oh, and “Christian” as sounding board.
Rotsa ruck as well. You’ll need it. Like Obama.
thanks for outing ms pelosi
frank
you rock!!