The Crimson Kimono (1959)

Film: The Crimson Kimono (1959)

Stars: James Shigeta, Glenn Corbett, Victoria Shaw

Director: Samuel Fuller

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

As I mentioned when we discussed Murder by Contract earlier this week, film noir as a genre closed most of its doors in the late 1950's.  At that point, stars like Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, & Humphrey Bogart who had defined film noir were either well past their prime or (in Bogie's case) dead, and they hadn't really been replaced.  Today we're going to talk about a film at the tale end of film noir, and in the next two days we'll close our month-long tribute to film noir with two pictures from the neo-noir revival of the genre that occurred in the 1970's.  The Crimson Kimono, directed by Samuel Fuller (who also directed House of Bamboo which we discussed this month-all links to past film noirs listed below), doesn't star any particularly recognizable actors, and in the 1959 the biggest name in this cast would've been James Shigeta, who was part of a small group of Asian actors like Nancy Kwan, France Nguyen, & Shirley Yamaguchi who gained fame in the late 1950's & early 1960's as marquee stars despite Hollywood's still overarching racism toward Asian actors, who even in this era were regularly played by white actors in yellowface.  What makes Crimson Kimono so intriguing to me upon revisiting it this month for the first time is the way that Fuller handles a potentially racist plot with sensitivity and grace...all on a tight, shoestring budget.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film opens with the murder of a gorgeous stripper named Sugar Torch, played by Gloria Pall but clearly meant to evoke the fading beauty ideal of Jayne Mansfield & Mamie van Doren (a big-breasted, oversexed blonde).  Though most think of Sugar as "trash," and not worth the detective work, two police officers: Joe Kojaka (Shigeta) and Charlie Bancroft (Corbett) investigate her murder, and seem to uncover a criminal ring which leads them to Christine Dowes (known in the movie as Chris, known in real life as Victoria Shaw).  Chris is an artist who painted Sugar, and as the movie continues both men start to fall for her, setting up a rare interracial love triangle that would've been impossible to imagine just a few years earlier on big screens.  As the film progresses, we learn that most of this criminal world is a red herring (the killer is in fact one of the women they'd met along their investigations, killing Sugar because she thought she was sleeping with her lover), but the main story becomes whether or not the partnership between Joe & Charlie can outlast them both being in love with Chris.

While the Hays Code was still partially in effect by 1959, we had started to see in the late 1950's the use of interracial relationships between actors of different races more frequently in studio films.  Whereas at the start of the decade you'd catch, say, Ava Gardner playing a black woman in Showboat, the first onscreen interracial kiss between Harry Belafonte & Joan Fontaine in 1957 set off a surprisingly robust group of films showing grown-up, true romances between white actors and actors of color including Sayonara, South Pacific, The World of Suzie Wong, and The Crimson Kimono.  That the film ends with Shigeta's Joe getting Shaw's Christine, rather than Corbett, is a sign that Fuller understood the changing times that would come in the 1960's, and had a bit more vision than you'd expect from an on-the-cheap Columbia film noir of this era.

The plot itself is relatively good.  As we enter the 1960's, a lot of the tropes about film noir had started to fade.  While Chris is a "woman in danger," she's not really a "dangerous woman" in the way we'd expect from a femme fatale, and so this movie, while billed as a film noir, is really more of just a crime drama than a film noir.  It doesn't help the case that while the plot handles Chris & Joe's romance well, all of the chemistry is between not Shaw & Shigeta but Shigeta & Corbett, playing off of each other in early scenes like a married couple.  In a truly different era, it would've been appropriate for these two to end up together, but alas, that wasn't in the cards in 1950's Hollywood quite yet.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia,The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Nightcrawler