New Print!

"He was a scoundrel. He was a liar. He was a bullshit artist. He was a writer," Sam Fuller said of Balzac. Fuller was of course all of these, too, and a genuine eccentric: a writer-director of major motion pictures that were by nature B films with the flavor of tabloid reporting; manifestly pro-American, yet a prescient critic of his country's violence and racism. In Crimson Kimono, Fuller uses L.A.'s Little Tokyo as the backdrop for a sympathetic portrayal of interracial romance imbedded in a police melodrama about the murder of a nightclub stripper. Two detectives, a Caucasian (Glenn Corbett) and a Japanese American (James Shigeta), fall in love with a white artist (Victoria Shaw) whom they meet in the course of the investigation. Competition brings out neuroses born from racial stress and cultural ambivalence. This is looked at head-on by Fuller and reinforced by using actual location shooting, including a chase down Little Tokyo's streets during a Japanese New Year festival. Fuller's characters are ambivalent, but the director celebrates both diversity and racial unity in a rare moment of optimism.