Quite often, my wife and I will watch a movie where one or the other (or both) of us will remark we wish we could see a film about some of the minor characters instead of the main characters. I was surprised when that wish was fulfilled by 1959’s The Crimson Kimono, an alleged noir that shifts its focus to an interracial romance after it all but abandons the main storyline, which concerns a murder investigation.
I really shouldn’t have been so surprised, as this was written and directed by Samuel Fuller. One of his more memorable films, The Naked Kiss, has a woman beat a man to death with a telephone receiver before her wig is whipped off, revealing she is bald (well, wearing a bald cap, technically). OK, nothing quite like that happens in this other film, but you get the point.
The picture is set in Los Angeles, opening on a bizarre strip tease being performed Gloria Pall in what appears to be at least two wigs. Judging from the sound, there’s an audience somewhere going crazy for her performance, though I’m not sure why. She doesn’t really do much of anything and she exits the stage almost fully clothed. Returning to her dressing room, somebody takes a shot at her. She flees, running barefoot past surprised people on the street in what appears to be a stolen shot. I suspect even the culmination of this scene, where she is gunned down in the street, was filmed on the sly, and I can’t begin to imagine what it would have been like to be an innocent bystander when this was happening. Also, when people were yelling for her to take it off, I doubt they expecting to shed her mortal coil.
Even from Fuller, this is already tawdrier than I was anticipating. It is definitely more lurid than what I would usually expect from Columbia Pictures, even if they were the most minor of the major studios (or the most major of the minors, depending upon your perspective).
Detectives played by Glenn Corbett and James Shigeta are on the case. Apparently, these two are only partners in the sense of their work, though I was confused by their living arrangements. Together, they share an apartment that seems to be more like a hotel, in that it has room service.
In the course of their investigation, they learn Pall had been planning a Vegas act bearing the title of this movie. The way it is described sounds a bit less than spectacular. She had roped in a couple of guys for the act, one Japanese and one Korean, which brings elements of those cultures into the plot.
We see rather a lot of Little Tokyo and…um, whatever area of LA is mostly Koreans. A fair amount of time is spent showing a Buddhist ceremony. It may not add anything to the plot, but I appreciated that moment. Also, we see parts of the city that otherwise would have likely not been documented on film. Similar to other crime pictures made by Columbia, the lower budgets often led to more interesting features, if only because they had to film in real places.
Another touch I liked was the large number of Asian-Americans on the screen, even if only a few of them have any lines. Some of the dialog is in untranslated Japanese, which I appreciated. And yet, the film also reveals how assimilated into American society some had become. Shigeta conducts an interview in English with a Japanese guy who knew Pall and asks how well another character speaks Japanese, to which the guy replies, “Almost as bad as mine”. I also liked how the same man reacts when he is informed Pall had died, sighing, “That poor little muffin.”
The trail eventually leads to Victoria Shaw, an artist who had done a painting of Pall as costumed for the planned Vegas show. She had been commissioned by the perpetually sweaty Neyle Morrow to paint that portrait, providing all the elements appearing in the finished art: kimono, wig, etc. His character is named Paul Sand, which my brain kept twisting into “pound sand”, which brought my juvenile sense of humor no end of amusement.
One thing I found confusing about Shaw’s character is we see her seemingly to run an art class when we first see her, so I assumed she was an instructor. Instead, she is a college art student, though something seems unconvincing about that. Also, she belongs to a sorority, which I can’t imagine was ever a popular choice for art students.
It isn’t long after she is introduced into the plot that the movie takes a peculiar change in tone. First, she appears to be a potential love interest for Corbett. Then, she is suddenly smitten with Shigeta. I’ll admit I was initially confused by a sneaky demeanor she suddenly adopts in a lengthy scene where they are alone in the apartment together for the first time. I thought she was up to something more nefarious when merely making goo-goo eyes at him.
What is most interesting about this development is the wedge it drives between the detectives. It’s not so much because each is vying for her affections, but due to Shigeta’s mistaken belief Corbett is resentful it was an Asian man who has won her heart.
The one character I could have done without is Anna Lee’s Mac, an “artist” who seems to have an odd relationship with Corbett I couldn’t quite get a read on. Lee goes waaay over the top in a performance as a painter that is painted in very broad strokes. She’s forever swigging booze, chomping cigars and falling (literally) into his arms. I suspected she was alluding to being bi-sexual at one point, which would be surprising for the time if that was the intention. It would be interesting if Mac was simply a character with many facets, but Lee plays her as bluntly as somebody playing the piano while wearing oven mitts.
In a curious bit of coincidence, I happened to see Shaw recently in I Aim at the Stars, where she was cast as Maria von Braun. She was given very little to do in that film, and is better here, in a role with more complexity. I had also recently seen Corbett in another film, playing an archetypical, uptight federal agent in A Man on a String. He was horribly wooden there, but is much better in the more nuanced role given him here. Corbett even seems to roll with some moments which could only be intentionally subversive humor. One scene, in particular, has him burst into an apartment with his gun drawn, scaring the wits out of a woman and her young daughter, resulting in everybody just screaming at each other. I also liked her response when he asks her if she knows a guy in a photograph he shows her: “How can I? It’s upside down.”
The Crimson Kimono is an odd movie, but all the better for it. It is one of the few times a bait-and-switch has resulted in a better film than what would have likely resulted if it stayed true to its original path. What started as straight noir becomes more of a cultural study and examination of racial tensions. Still, it remembers the solve the core mystery in the final minutes of its runtime, which may be surprising given how little the death of a stripper seems to matter by that time. According to one character, “Nobody cares who killed that tramp.”
Dir: Samuel Fuller
Starring Victoria Shaw, Glenn Corbett, James Shigeta
Watched as part of Mill Creek’s blu-ray box set Film Noir Archive Volume 3: 1957-1960