Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
After a stripper (“Sugar Torch”) is gunned down in the street, LAPD detectives Sgt. Charlie Bancroft and Joe Kojaku (Glenn Corbett and James Shigeta) are tasked with picking her killer out from a short list of unsavory types while keeping young college co-ed and artist Christine Downes (Victoria Shaw), key witness and acquaintance of the deceased, out of harm’s way. This, in the inexplicable mores of the era (or at least in the logic of Samuel Fuller’s 1959 post-noir The Crimson Kimono), requires the precocious creative shack up with the detectives in their hotel suite – safer than her sorority house, they reason – where, to no great surprise, a love triangle develops between the very-dissimilar officers and their attractive ward. The tautly formal yet sensitive Kojaku plays piano, while the more unprofessional and headstrong Bancroft, with a jawline of chiseled granite, launches double-entendres at the young woman, and the conflict between the “knucklehead” upstart and grizzled veteran is underlined by deeper hints of ethnic tension and reinforced by their mirrored affections. In a vocabulary already well-established by writer-director Fuller, it’s a story of star-crossed lovers. Like his previous China Gate, one of its primary focuses is race and on the difference between hatred born of bigotry (one of Fuller’s enduring themes) and “normal, healthy, jealous hate.”
The Los Angeles of the period depicted in Crimson Kimono was a roiling, fluid battleground as much as previous Fuller subjects the Korean War (The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets!), early postwar Germany and Japan (Verboten! and House of Bamboo) and the anarchic psychiatric hospital in Shock Corridor. In L.A.’s case, having finally succumbed to the sprawl of the post-World War II boom, its once-vibrant inner city was gradually abandoned to a single shifting mass of congestive steel contraptions (its iconic Pacific Electric streetcar line entirely sold off and scrapped by 1961) and minority residents denied a part in the economic miracle play. The backdrop of its next decade was colored by a crumbling cityscape and pressure-cooker tensions that would explode in 1965′s Watts riots, a reality into which Fuller’s portrait of a volatile city and serious look at race neatly fits. If “love is a battlefield” and “somebody has to get a bloody nose,” what about a city of vice and glamour four-plus million people thick?
In Sam Leavitt, Fuller found a reliable cinematographer for Crimson Kimono, one who had just received an Oscar for work in The Defiant Ones and would go on to shoot Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Leavitt’s handy cinematography, smoothly conscious and unafraid of bold frames, alternating between wide shots of teeming Los Angeles streets and dramatic interior close-ups, reinforces the idea of city-as-battleground. Long takes, graceful pans and natural staging had already been Fuller’s standbys for some time, but Leavitt’s nuanced eye renders them specially. Collectively, Leavitt and Fuller’s flexibility in presenting dual tracks of human drama and broader political tensions amounts to a sensitive, weighty translation of the struggle with interethnic relations in that time period, from the loose grit of the opening sequence to the final heated exchange between Bancroft and Kojaku. Sequences of Buddhist services and stark, placid shots of the Nisei Veterans Memorial provide the same juxtaposition that American soldiers quartered in The Steel Helmet’s Buddhist temple did, and missteps in the ambitious yet clumsy execution of the kendo match are mitigated by what is otherwise solid technical drive supplied by Fuller and editor Jerome Thoms (with whom Fuller would do Shock Corridor and Naked Kiss).
Even though much of the interpersonal drama, largely soundstaged and set in apartments and the detectives’ hotel, sometimes plays out like cozy theater, Corbett and Shigeta render their partners believably, communicating deeper loyalty that transcends the simple bond, forged years prior in a foxhole, necessitated by their hardscrabble existence. But the ultimate message of Crimson Kimono, that the racism Shigeta’s detective faces is “all in his head” (to an extent), only heightens the contrast with Fuller’s portrayal of women, with both of the film’s primary female characters shown often in weak and subservient light and treated by the detectives either crassly or paternalistically, no less a transgression than the vicious nymphos Fuller has attack Shock Corridor’s own myopic detective. But you can’t call the movie cynical, for all its pessimism: even Bancroft’s jilted ex-lover gets another shot by the picture’s finish, and while she says “I prefer something made by man, to something made by an oyster,” her statement stands in direct opposition to the perfect pearl of a conclusion unfolding just feet away from her. As Kojaku says, “You can’t fight a natural feeling.” And for all of The Crimson Kimono’s cigar-chomping realism, Fuller couldn’t fight that happy ending.
