Critics reviews

In the repressed landscape of the American popular cinema of the 1950s, leave it to Fuller to attempt something exceedingly rare: a credible portrayal of a person of color with a palpable inner life who also lives to see a brighter tomorrow.

The movie is driven and enlivened by the filmmaker's wedding of genre trope, eccentric visual and verbal symbolism, and common-sense decency, yielding a distinctly pure kind of macho empathy that can only be called Fuller-esque.

The pacing is breakneck and the dialogue is thick with the kinds of hard-boiled statements of principle that were Fuller's stock-in-trade. In place of a femme fatale, the film has real, smart, creative women, Chris (Victoria Shaw) and Mac (Anna Lee); in place of a smattering of local color, it has the most detailed depiction of an Asian-American community to ever grace a genre flick. It's raw, risqué, more than a little risky, and it isn't afraid to punch for the gut.

What saves Fuller's language and his style from seeming risibly overheated is this constant sense that he wants more from words and images than they can give, more from the senses than they can provide.... In long continuous tracking shots we move with the characters and inhabit their space, but abrupt cross-cuts between different scenes slice through the flow, and sudden extreme close-ups seem like an attempt to force us under the actors' skins.

Despite being marketed as a salacious B-movie during its original run, Samuel Fuller's THE CRIMSON KIMONO is a complex film noir that uses unexampled variations on familiar plot conventions to scrutinize racial tension.