(This is the first of what may become a regular feature profiling individuals, Asian American and non-Asian alike, who have made a contribution to our culture and history but may not be well known to the current generation)

In my humble opinion, maverick filmmaker Samuel Fuller may have done more to create realistic and positive portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans than any other non-Asian in Hollywood. Although he had a long career as a filmmaker starting as a screenwriter in 1936 that lasted until his death in 1997, Fuller was never as famous as his directing contemporaries like John Huston and John Ford, but he made an indelible impact on American film–influencing a whole generation of future mavericks like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Curtis Hanson. His movies were accused of being barbaric and rough, but that’s what made them so powerful. His canvas was the mean urban streets littered with crime or battlefields where war was ugly and messy, but he found both the poetry and the truth in these worlds. That’s what made his work so memorable.

Fuller also regularly populated his films with Asian and Asian American characters who were three-dimensional, real and interesting. All the filmic evidence suggests that this wasn’t a man with “yellow fever.” This was a man who saw the humanity in our people in a way Hollywood usually didn’t. If you think this is still rare now, imagine how bad it must have been fifty years ago when Fuller was at his prime.

I never had the chance to meet Fuller and ask him why he had this interest in all things Asian, but when I was introduced to his widow a couple of years after his death, she told me that Sam would have been delighted to hear me refer to him as an honorary Asian American filmmaker. Part of his interest may have come from his experience in the Army during World War II (though most of his service was in the European theater as opposed to the Pacific), but I think his pre-Hollywood career as a newspaperman had a lot to do with it, too. As a journalist, Fuller advocated for the underdog and that sensibility is evident in his all his films. And you couldn’t be more of an underdog than to be Asian in America.

It was his third film as a director, 1951’s The Steel Helmet, which first caught my eye. Gene Evans plays a cynical American solider in the Korean War grappling with the futility and madness that surrounds him. Sounds like standard genre stuff and one would expect the Asians in a film like this to be faceless Communist bad guys who exist to be killed by the white soldiers. Not in a Fuller film. One of the Americans in Evan’s unit is the Japanese American Sgt. Tanaka (Richard Loo). At one point, a North Korean solider who has been taken prisoner questions Tanaka about how he can be loyal to the U.S. when the government interned him and his family during World War II. I saw this film in college and I was surprised that a Hollywood movie from that time could include such an insightful exchange about the internment between a Nisei soldier and a North Korean POW of all people.

  (Loo as Nisei soldier Tanaka)

But the scene that really impressed me takes place when the soldiers have stopped to rest. One of the soldiers pulls out a portable accordion and starts playing the song “Auld Lang Syne.” A young Korean orphan named Short Round (yes, this is where Steven Spielberg cribbed the name for Indy’s Asian kid sidekick in Temple of Doom), who has been unofficially adopted by the Americans, starts singing along. But the song the boy sings is the Korean national anthem which, as it turns out, has the very same tune as “Auld Lang Syne.” The young actor playing Short Round is clearly not Korean and his language skills suck, but I was blown away that this white filmmaker knew that “Auld Lang Syne” and the Korean National Anthem shared the same music. I grew up hearing both songs and never made the connection, yet Fuller somehow did. Compare for yourself: here and here.

  (The original Short Round)

The Steel Helmet intrigued me and I started checking out Fuller’s other films and I wasn’t disappointed. Of course, he made a number of war films set in Asia so Asian faces were plentiful, but he also practiced non-traditional casting at a time when that word didn’t even exist. For example, in his 1963 potboiler Shock Corridor, veteran Korean American actor Philip Ahn played a psychiatrist. He didn’t play a foreign psychiatrist. He didn’t have an accent. He was just a regular American psychiatrist who counsels the lead character.

  (Philip Ahn in Shock Corridor)

Now Fuller wasn’t perfect. His House of Bamboo (1955) was a typical white man in Asia action thriller, and in China Gate (1957), he couldn’t resist putting Angie Dickinson in yellow face, but overall, his films were pretty progressive.

However, the Fuller film that is a true revelation in this regard is 1959’s The Crimson Kimono starring Japanese American veteran James Shigeta as Joe Kojaku, a Nisei homicide detective working out of the LAPD station in Little Tokyo (which is still there today). Shigeta’s best friend is Charlie, his detective partner played by Glenn Corbett, who is white. The two fall in love with the same woman (Victoria Shaw) while investigating the murder of a stripper; which strains their friendship and brings racist feelings to the surface that did not exist before.

Following is an extended clip where Shigeta is conflicted because he now knows that he loves Shaw and that she loves him back, but he doesn’t want to act on his feelings because Corbett loves Shaw too. Shigeta doesn’t want to hurt his best friend, but his anger also starts to surface because he suspects Corbett doesn’t think he stands a chance with the girl because he is Japanese. The two best friends begin to experience tension in their relationship for the first time:

Now, the film has its flaws and some of its politics will feel dated, but The Crimson Kimono is filled with rich details that Japanese Americans will recognize–from Shigeta and Corbett’s tongue-in-cheek debate about the virtues of Nisei woman vs. Kibei women, to the use of real Little Tokyo locations and the climactic scene that takes place during the Nisei Week ceremonies (the film was shot during the actual 1958 Nisei Week). On a personal note, one of the highlights of my own short career was getting the chance to direct Shigeta in a project and hearing him tell stories about working for Fuller (yup, Fuller would shoot a gun into the air at the start of each take as legend says).

But here’s the amazing part—in a Hollywood film where the love triangle consisted of a white man and an Asian man both vying for the same white woman–it’s Shigeta who ends up with Shaw. The last image of the film is Shigeta giving Shaw a passionate kiss while the Nisei Week parade passes by. If this is still a rare sight today (can you imagine a film coming out now where Matt Damon and Daniel Dae Kim play romantic rivals for Cameron Diaz and Kim wins out?), think of what it must have been like in 1959.

How did this film even get green-lit by a major studio? Well, Harry Cohn, then head of Columbia Pictures, approached Fuller to make a movie for his studio. This was Fuller’s succinct pitch for the story he wanted to tell—a Japanese cop and a white cop both fall in love with the same woman and the Japanese guy ends up with the girl.

Cohn’s reaction was allegedly one of “holy shit, Sam! I can’t do that! Think of how the people in the Midwest will react! Can’t you do something else?” Fuller replied that this was the only film he wanted to make so take it or leave it. Back then, studio heads were also mavericks who made decisions based on their gut and not market research, so Cohn decided to take the risk and gave Fuller the money to make The Crimson Kimono with no interference (who’d want to interfere with a director who was packing heat on the set anyway). The film did indeed perform poorly in the Midwest and most of America, but it’s become somewhat of a cult classic now, all the more so because it is still not available on video or DVD and difficult to find.

For these reasons and more, and for just being a bad ass and uncompromising filmmaker, Samuel Fuller is my choice for the first of the Original Offenders. Check out his work and decide for yourself.

Following is the first ten minutes of The Typewriter, The Rifle And The Movie Camera, actor Tim Robbin’s excellent 1996 documentary on Fuller. This excerpt includes a clip of the scene from The Steel Helmet between the Nisei soldier and the North Korean POW mentioned above (at 8:16) as well as insightful interviews by Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch:

If you’re interested, you can watch the rest of the doc in five additional parts on YouTube:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6