Summary
In a sun-scorched California where the chaparral bleeds into the Pacific, cowboy Jim Kern trades spurs for a doughboy’s tin hat, lured by bugles that promise valor across an ocean already drowning in mustard gas. While he and fellow pale riders ship out to the Marne’s cratered moonscape, a silk-smooth zealot named Frank Akuri—equal parts poet and predator—slips through Angel Island’s fog with a manifesto: seed the Golden State with the Rising Sun’s children until the Star-Spangled Banner frays into a Rising Sun silhouette. Back home, Jim’s beloved Mary—whose ranch sprawls like a Remington canvas—finds her cattle unmilked, her fences unstrung: every able Japanese laborer has sworn a blood-oath to starve the white landowner. Akuri’s velvet-gloved coercion forces her signature onto a deed, and overnight the valley becomes a micro-colony of kimonoed spies and lantern-lit strategy. Mary, refusing to wilt into a Victorian cameo, galvanizes Sacramento’s corseted matriarchs; their lace-gloved petition to Congress sparks headlines about a “yellow menace,” igniting racial tinder that even the Sierra snow cannot quell. Akuri answers with assassins cloaked as field hands—bullets meant for suffragists and ranch widows alike—yet fate, in the form of a troopship, delivers Jim and his comic sidekick back to Monterey pines just as night-riders encircle the women. A rescue, fierce and sloppy, buys only a reprieve: Akuri kidnaps Mary to his San Francisco penthouse, a paper-walled labyrinth reeking of sandalwood and betrayal. Salvation arrives via Akuri’s cast-off mistress, a Japanese beauty scorched by jealousy; she leaks the location to Jim, who assembles a posse of barroom Legionnaires for a last-charge up a Nob Hill high-rise. Gunfire shatters shoji screens; Akuri plummets through a stained-glass skylight, his imperial dream shards raining onto the sidewalk like black petals. The colony disperses, the ranch reverts, yet the land—once innocent—now bears the scar of a lesson nobody asked to learn.
Synopsis
California cowpuncher Jim Kern and his pal enlist in the war against Germany and soon meet Frank Akuri, who has pledged to colonize the United States for his homeland, Japan. While Jim and other white males are fighting in France, Akuri forces Jim's sweetheart Mary to sell her ranch, as she is not able to run it because the only men left, the Japanese, have pledged not to work for the whites. With the ranch, Akuri begins his colony. Mary counters by organizing her society-lady friends to appeal to Congress against the "yellow menace." When it seems that his plans will be thwarted, Akuri issues orders for the deaths of Mary and her friends, but Jim and his pal return and rescue them. Akuri kidnaps Mary and takes her to his apartment, but with the help of Akuri's wronged Japanese lover, Jim learns her whereabouts. He organizes a posse of American Legion locals and rescues Mary just as Akuri is about to murder her. Akuri's group is routed out.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I saw Shadows of the West—a 35 mm nitrate print flickering like a dying campfire in the UCLA vault—I felt the room tilt. Here was a Western that dared to swap sagebrush for Yellow Peril hysteria, a film so naked in its prejudice it could pass for a Klan recruitment reel wearing chaps. Yet under the rot is a curio of kinetic bravura: silhouettes slashed across doorways, chiaroscuro horse hooves pounding through Chinatown backlots, a heroine whose close-ups radiate the defiant watt..."
