The Crimson Kimono

Samuel Fuller’s Crimson Kimono (1959) is, like Odds against Tomorrow (1959), a paradigmatic late ‘50s American noir. Part policier, part melodrama, part “art” film, part “B” or exploitation picture, The Crimson Kimono deploys the sort of self-reflexive devices associated with Douglas Sirk’s ‘50s melodramas in order to “estrange” or “alienate” the dark crime film. For example, by portraying an interracial romance and commenting on the cliché of Oriental inscrutability, The Crimson Kimono foregrounds the black-and-white moral calculus of melodrama even as italicizes the racial difference, not to say racism, that has been a part, however occluded, of the history of “black film.” Equally importantly, by refiguring the film’s Asian-American police detective as the “hero” of the narrative who solves the case and “gets the girl,” Fuller’s film refashions one of the constitutive tropes of the genre, the “Shanghai gesture,” a trope that can itself be traced back to The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the origins of classic American film noir.