You guys know how I love old movies. For the most part, the ones I watch are lauded classics. It's pretty rare for me to hit on a film that is just utterly ham-handed in its presentation of race or gender relations. Welcome to The Crimson Kimono! I can't remember where or when I added it to my Netflix list. It's never been available and I finally got tired of it and looked it up online. About ten minutes into watching it, I realized precisely why it was so hard* to find.
When the stripper Sugar Torch (Gloria Pall) is murdered, detectives and war buddies Sgt. Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) and Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta) investigate. They discover that Sugar was putting together a new act based on Japanese geishas and had hired a local artist, Chris Downs (Victoria Shaw), to provide mock-ups of some of the costume and set designs. Bancroft goes to track down the artist while Kojaku attempts to locate the guy hired to play a samurai opposite Sugar's geisha. Bancroft is surprised and pleased to discover that Chris is actually Christine and spends the majority of his fact-finding repeatedly hitting on her because he apparently went to the same police academy as Steve Guttenberg. Things really get weird, however, when Chris is also targeted by the mysterious killer and the two detectives decide to move her into their apartment. Bancroft continues to pitch the woo as the kids say but Chris is more interested in Kojaku. But oh no, what if he doesn't want her because she's white? How will they ever work as an interracial couple in Los Angeles? Meanwhile, Kojaku flips the fuck out at Bancroft, accusing him of being a racist when Bancroft seems stunned that Chris would choose Kojaku over him. Somehow, in all of this, these two terrible cops manage to actually solve the murder, and the film ends with Kojaku apologizing because he had wrongly perceived Bancroft's jealousy as racism.
Hey, People of Color, did you know racism is just all in your head? According to this movie, it is! So you should never, you know, accuse White People of being racist, even though there are literally hundreds of years of documented cases because they might think you're rude for projecting what is clearly a persecution complex on your part and not a systemic degradation of who you are as human beings woven into the fabric of every institution in America!
Look no further than the poster which shows an "American" girl being kissed by a "Japanese" man, even though Kojaku is just as much of an American citizen as Christine and an Army veteran on top of that. But that's all secondary to his race, which is clearly the forefront of this movie.
It's not exactly a hot take to point out there was racism in movies from the 1950s, but I think it is worth noting the ideology of trying to undermine people from calling out the racism that they experienced by saying that they're just being too sensitive about it. Here, it's pretty ham-handed and might be written off as just a shitty script but what I'm worried about are all the ones that weren't so clumsy, that were just accepted as part of the status quo. Because that's where the real danger is, the message that already conforms to what you believe and reinforces biases you didn't even know you had. That's why representation is so important.
I know this is already waaaaay longer than most of my posts but I'd like to take a minute to talk about James Shigeta as an actor. He got fucking robbed, y'all. That man had charisma for days and in a just world, would have been a huge romantic lead through the 70s before scaling back to elder statesman in a few prestige pics. Instead, he was relegated to side character, got one major film lead in a predominantly Asian cast, tried to get another off the ground, flopped, and then got stuck doing bit parts until he was Tanaka in Die Hard. He deserved so much more. And that's my hot take.
*And by "hard" I mean it took more than 30 seconds to click on links until I found one that seemed legit. I'm so very lazy, you guys.
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