Shigeta's humility undersells his incredible screen presence — suave, sizzling, magnetic — and the ground he broke in the depiction of Asians on the silver screen.

In his very first cinematic turn, in Sam Fuller's acclaimed 1959 cult noir "The Crimson Kimono," he played Detective Joe Kojaku, a tough Japanese American cop who ends up in an interracial love triangle with his partner and the key witness to a murder case — and gets the girl in the end. The final shot of the movie is an extended kiss between Kojaku and...