The Crimson Kimono 1959

Pulp  friction.  Made in 1959 and running a tight 82 minutes, film brut Sam Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono opens with an aerial nighttime shot of Los Angles, with a caption telling us where we are that comes shooting at us in bold letters like a newspaper headline. Fuller then puts us outside an actual cheap Burlesque theatre on main street and soon we are inside watching a somewhat zaftig over the hill stripper named Sugar Torch doing her act to some loud jazzy jittery music.  Fuller then follows her off stage and as she opens her dressing room door we catch a glimpse of a figure who fires shots at her, and this sets poor sugar off and running down the street where her killer soon catches up with her and shoots her down dead. This is a fabulous opening done without dialogue and shot on location in a long tracking shot by the great Sam Levitt and sets the tone for the rest of the movie.  Much  of the film of course concerns the hunt for the killer but Fuller drapes this murder mystery  over a story of interracial love that was way ahead of it’s time.and  peppers it with an intense male bonding friendship between two cops played by the very good and sensitive actor James Shigeta and an all American cute as a button Glenn Corbett. The guys met in Korea where they shared a fox hole and some blood that literally saved the life of one of them. Now in L.A. they share an apartment and most of their free time together that has a lurking homoerotic touch to it. In fact Curtis Hanson on the dvd supplement goes as far as to call it a love story between the two of them.  But let’s not get too excited because although there is a love story sandwiched between the murder plot, it’s a triangle between them and a woman artist who is a prime key to the murder. The artist named Chris at one time painted a portrait of Sugar wearing a kimono and might have some information on who put out Sugar’s torch.  Chris is played by the trim, proper, attractive but dull late 50’s starlet Victoria Shaw who is the complete opposite of another artist in the film Mac played by Anna Lee (very good) who is Alcoholic and vibrant (she spits beer on her large abstract paintings),where Shaw is cold and aloof.  Its Interestingly I guess that both females in the film have male names (this is not the first time fuller has given his females characters male names or nicknames)  and the Lee character is another strong but flawed motherly type that Fuller favors in many of his films. Joe the James Shigeta character is smart and sensitive (he even plays the piano) but has problems dealing with his Japanese American heritage and has huge conflicts over his love for Chris and his perceived notions of hurting his best friend who also has feelings for her. This is where the friction comes in. It’s there between the two friends, and it’s there within Shigeta who has self-doubts and feelings of persecution that threatens his relationships with Chris and Corbett. Fuller fills his scenes with lots of good details, and the on location shooting of a now gone L.A. also helps to give the film a good tangy feel. As usual with many unappreciated B’s at the time, this one was dumped on a double bill with “Battle of The Coral Sea” that starred Cliff Robinson who would give what I consider to be his best performance two years late in Fuller’s “Underworld U.S.A.  Thanks to the recent arrival of the film on dvd in a very nice transfer audiences can now discover this little seen Sam Fuller film for themselves. One of the ten best films of 1959