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Is Samuel Fuller a B-movie poet or a masculine cult figure of the American cinema? A little bit of both, in my opinion as it depends on the film. Even then, sometimes the film in question is a blurring of the two modes.
Take The Crimson Kimono, a pleasurable little jewel that lands somewhere between rough noir, racial drama, and conflicted love story. Fuller’s bait-and-switch is masterfully controlled and revealed smartly as we’re slowly introduced to the interracial cop partners (James Shigeta, Glenn Corbett) investigating the murder of a stripper and their erotic fixation on a potential witness (Victoria Shaw). Think of the hard-boiled, often drunk (both on alcohol and her own mythmaking) Mac (Anna Lee), a noir creation that gives vibrancy and flavor to the proceedings. She’s a poetic and tough creation, the kind of thing you only find in pulpy cinema.
The Crimson Kimono generates palpable tension by allowing prolonged scenes of these characters merely interacting. Their tensions with each other provide sub-textual crackle, like the vague homoeroticism of cop partners in these ultra-masculine stories who feel tremendous hurt when a woman derails the stasis. Or watching Lee and Corbett size each other up and talk around each other while their sexual tension and amusement with each other rises.
The emphasis on building the emotional infrastructure of these relationships undergirds the tension as things go sideways. Is Shigeta right that Corbett’s reaction and bruised ego at “losing” Shaw to him an ugly racial flareup? Well, the matter-of-fact way Fuller treats their love story is potential evidence, or there’s a few other possible readings as Fuller loved to give his work contentious material. I’ll leave a few of them to your imagination.
If there is any problem with The Crimson Kimono it is in the whiplash that happens as you transition from the gritty murder-mystery to the love triangle and beyond. The murder-mystery becomes a distant memory as the film reaches a climax and the mixed couple go off… into the sunset? At least Fuller provides an exploration of a post-war psyche that is fractured and scarred for Shigeta as he feels between worlds, both American and distinctly foreign at the same time. This provides some continuity between the two divergent narrative aims as the white hero is sidelined and the “other” occupies the spotlight. Consider another notch for Fuller’s canonization as empathetic macho man.
