USA, 1959

Director: Samuel Fuller

There's plenty that's predictable in The Crimson Kimono, a B movie about Los Angeles detectives on the trail of a killer: As soon as a beautiful witness appears, you know a detective will fall for her. At the mere mention of an upcoming parade through Little Tokyo, it's inevitable the cops will chase someone through the middle of it. Innocent-seeming woman from out of town? Knows more than she's letting on. What's not so predictable are the rooms shot from the ceiling, the gritty location footage of downtown, the jarring jump cuts, and most of all writer/director/producer Fuller's sensitive, even heroic depiction of Japanese-Americans. In an onstage interview after the SFIAAFF '06 screening of Crimson, star James Shigeta said Fuller knew a lot of people in the Japanese-American community. That shows up in a story and a series of details that are miles ahead of how Hollywood as a whole was treating Asian-Americans in 1959 -- and even now. Fuller clearly has a point to make, stretching out shots of two plaques at a cemetary long enough for us to read their tributes to fallen Japanese-American soldiers. But there are other signs that his knowledge of the community came from first-hand experience or research (Shigeta's character, Joe Kojaku, was based on a real Japanese-American LAPD detective) rather than Orientalist fantasies. When Joe meets up with two of his martial-arts buddies early in the film, all three speak without foreign accents. Joe and his detective partner, Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett), who are also housemates and old war buddies, converse easily as equals. They also both compete in kendo, and Charlie isn't the only Caucasian who participates in the league or in other cultural activities in Little Tokyo. This is the real Asian America that's so rarely seen in Hollywood films, so it's puzzling later on in the movie when tensions appear to flare up over an interracial romance and Joe goes into an identity crisis. However, his confusion may not have been so unlikely in the continental U.S. in 1959, just 14 years after World War II and internment. After that's resolved, the story plays out happily and perhaps predictably, though the closing shot is jaw-dropping to this day: so Hollywood, yet so opposite Hollywood.