Out In The 1950s L.A. Noir Night-Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Zack James

The Crimson Kimono, starring Victoria Shaw, James Shigeta, Glenn Corbett

Sam Lowell, now that he had turned the day to day operations of his small law office to a younger associate, had during the previous couple of years been deep in the search for old time black and white films, mainly film noir, that he had seen as a kid growing up in Carver down in southeastern Massachusetts at the local Majestic Theater on Thornton Street. The main vehicle for igniting that interest had been through Netflix, either grabbing DVDs or by streaming, although many of the films that interested him were not available on that latter source. At some point he had run through what he called the primo classics, the ones that make the top one hundred Hollywood films of all time like Sunset Boulevard, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, Double Indemnity,   The Big Sleep, Out Of The Past, The Maltese Falcon stuff like that. He then started going after what he, and Hollywood critics as well, would call B films, films made on a shoestring or which just didn’t have enough storyline, good acting or cinematography to make that primo list.

As usual there was plenty more B material around than classics especially from that black and white film era when the crush for double-feature films every week or so led to some cutting of corners. The film under review, Sam Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono, is just such a film although it does have a twist that you generally did not see in Hollywood films in the hard-boiled red scare Cold War 1950s night.

Usually Sam would just grab a DVD, look at it, maybe write a few hundred words about some aspect of the film that interested him, storyline, acting, camera work, or when he wanted up front and personal one and all to know he had panned had it. The Crimson Kimono though although thin on the acting by well-known B actors had a twist that he wanted his friend from high school days in Carver, Bart Webber, who also had some interest in those black and white films since he would when younger accompany Sam on Saturday afternoons to the double-feature at the Majestic. (Later, in high school, when going to the movies was the essence of a cheap “hot date” with some girl of interest each man had to fend for himself although they occasionally double-dated in the “pits,” the balconies at night so-called for obvious reasons.)

One night Bart went on one of his periodic visits from Carver where had had resided almost all of his life up to Cambridge where Sam lived to go to Jack’s and have a few drinks and talk about whatever there was to talk about. That night Sam was hot on the trail of discussing what he had thought of The Crimson Kimono. Here’ what Sam had to say when Bart told me about it later:         

How are you going to hate a movie, a film noir even, a police procedural, that was set in Los Angeles, not in the flamed out 1940s slumming streets of The Big Sleep and other Raymond Chandler classics but the 1950s when the place was starting to jump from a sleepy old town of the homegrown, Okies, Arkies and whoever else hightailed it out of wherever they were from to get to the “garden of Eden.” So you got the sprawl as backdrop but also since you were dealing with tinsel-town, Hollywood, you also got the refuge, the fates of those who did not make it up onto the big screen but still had nowhere else to go after they busted flat or else preferred to slum it than go back to Peoria or Lima, Ohio or wherever they hailed from. That too is the back-drop to the town’s seamy side. Here’s an add-on though and this is what will eventually separate this film out a bit from others for we get a look, a small but positive look, at L.A.s Japan Town. That in itself would be worthy of note because remember the Pacific War was still pretty fresh in everybody out on the West Coast’s mind and remember too most of those denizens of Japan Town also had etched into their brains that they were different-were different enough in World War II to wind up in the concentration camps set up in the West.       

Who knows where an urban ethnic enclave ends and where the low-life haunts begin. Remember when we used to come up to Boston to see the strip shows in what they rightly called the Combat Zone right next to the squabble of Chinatown. Well in L.A. the strip joints and “clip” joints, really the same thing as you know, were adjacent to Japan Town. One night one of the strippers, this Sugar Torch, a looker and with a bumps and curves shape that guys in the ‘50s were crazy for wound up, after fleeing for her life, dead, very dead, from a couple of slugs on the seamy streets of L.A.

Naturally the coppers, buddies who had been in Korea and now roomed together, in this case a white cop, played by Glenn Corbett, a good-looking guy who played cop and detective parts with a sneer, who you probably have seen in a few of these B films, and get this, a Japanese cop, played by Jimmy Shigeta, who are called on to investigate the murder ran into a few dead ends before they figured the thing out, or rather got the thing figured out for them. See this honey, this Sugar Torch, was looking for a new gimmick, a new tease to replace the one she had been doing which was getting old fast with the regular customers. So she planned to do some exotic Geisha girl strip. Of course she was clueless about anything Japanese so she went to the library where one of the librarians, a guy, Hansel, helped her get the details down right. That was our Sugar’s fatal mistake though. This Hansel’s girlfriend, a wigmaker, thought old Sugar was making a play for Hansel and got gun happy. No way but that was how the deal went down, how things played out for motive on this one.

Along the way the cops had brought in a student artist, Christine, played by Victoria Shaw who seemed too old and mature to be a student, but who knows, to make a sketch of the supposed murderer, who everybody thought was Hansel. No go-it was the girlfriend like I said. She got antsy about what Hansel might say once the cops grabbed him. She started firing away. Here’s a strange part after the Japanese cop gunned her down she laid on the seamy street just like the stripper-in a heap. I figure that was Sam Fuller going for effect.             

Here is where this one is a little different from most police procedurals, most noir too, since they usually want to hone in on the murder and mayhem part. In this though solving the murder is kind of backdrop to the main action-the triangle love affair business. See this student artist Christine was a looking, smart too, so first Glenn took a run at her, figured he had it made, then Jimmy took a run as well. That part, the racial part, which gets a big play when the two cops finally realize what was happening, is what separates this one out because in the end the Japanese guy wins the hand of the fair Wasp maiden. Go figure in the 1950s