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| Images courtesy of Warner Brothers |
The curious thing director Joshua
Logan and screenwriter Paul Osborn’s adaptation of novelist James A. Michener’s
post-WWII/Korean War set international romantic drama Sayonara was that
it was made back-to-back with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South
Pacific a year later by the same creative team. Logan himself an army veteran of the Second
World War turned fellow student of Stanislavski who went on to become a Pulitzer
Prize winning playwright for co-authoring the original South Pacific stage
play before bringing it to the silver screen, the filmmaker garnered his second
Oscar nomination with the Japan based romantic drama starring Marlon Brando. In this Technirama 2.35:1 scope widescreen
valentine to film lovers and WWII vets, author James A. Michener’s
semi-autobiographical tale of an American soldier who falls in love with a
Japanese woman while stationed overseas marked a number of breakthroughs in
Hollywood mainstream cinema including featuring the first East Asian born woman
to win an Academy Award.
In Sayonara, we find USAF
fighter pilot Major Lloyd “Ace” Gruver (Marlon Brando) has been reassigned from
his combat post in Korea to an Air Force Base near Kobe by General Webster
(Kent Smith), father of his fiancée Eileen (Patricia Owens). Despite best intentions, their relationship
is on thin ice and fraught with disappointments and frustration. Meanwhile his friend and mate Airman Joe
Kelly (Red Buttons) is on the cusp of wedding Katsumi (Miyoshi Umeki who won an
Oscar for her role) against the collective disapproval of the military, Air
Force and Ace himself. However, after
patching things up and agreeing to become his mate’s Best Man, he attends a
live Takarazuka theater prominently featuring Hana-ogi (Miiko Taka in her
screen debut) and soon finds his interest in his engagement waning as he falls
in love with the Japanese woman. Meanwhile
the military starts penalizing Joe for the romantic path he chose while
threatening to split up Ace’s own newfound connection and the film very much
becomes a true-to-life sort of Romeo and Juliet.
Though dated by the film’s brief use
of yellowface in one character played by Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan actor
Ricardo Montalban, a problem supposedly related to ‘not being able to find an
actor for that part’, the interracial romantic drama sought nevertheless to
address problems with racism and prejudicial views between Americans and East
Asians stemming from the aftermath of WWII going into the Korean War. As such it was an attempt to turn the
spotlight on an entire postwar generation of soldiers marrying Japanese women
while serving a tour of duty in microcosm, speaking volumes to the antipathy,
xenophobia on both sides and endurances felt by the individuals divided by
circumstance yet united in heart. A
real-world postwar romance set during a transitional period in history, shot in
lush widescreen by former WWII veteran and Invasion of the Body Snatchers cinematographer
Ellsworth Fredricks and aided by a moving if not lovely score by Sunset
Boulevard composer Franz Waxman, the world of the film drifts in between
the Itami Air Base and a Japanese village interspersed with elements of Kabuki
theater and sights of American soldiers donning kimonos.
An ensemble piece featuring notable
character actors like James Garner and an unlikely Oscar winning dramatic turn
by Red Buttons (ordinarily a comedian), the film represents another stellar and
impassioned leading performance from Marlon Brando who once again garnered a
nomination but for some reason didn’t win that year. Nuanced and subtle, playing a strong but
controlled lead whose emotional weathers drift away from his roots to his
current residence, Brando makes Ace into a flawed but eager-to-learn hero
always striving to do the moral and just thing in the face of prejudices. Cat People star as well as WWII
veteran Kent Smith who plays Ace’s General and potential father-in-law carries
over his own wartime experiences into the character while Patricia Owens, the
heroine of the original The Fly, makes Eileen into an equally complex
woman who also finds herself falling in love with a Japanese man. Sadly, while Miyoshi Umeki took home a Best
Supporting Actress Oscar, her career in film didn’t extend much longer though
she picked up a prolific tenure in television.
Featuring an original song by Irving
Berlin dedicated to the film’s title, the film opened theatrically to widespread
critical adulation as well as topping box office charts for four weeks in 1958,
earning a total of $26 million in global ticket sales. Garnering a whopping nine Oscar nominations (four
of which it won), the bilingual English-Japanese film succeeded its cinematic
counterparts Japanese War Bride and The Teahouse of the August Moon exponentially
in terms of its overarching impact on race relations and tolerance. Though some feel it perpetuates the stereotype
of the ‘dragon lady’, in the hands of postwar veterans having served in combat
now making feature films it feels like a confessional pouring out the hamper of
dirty laundry on the table consisting of an entire generation of soldiers who
were reprimanded for daring to follow their heart against then-present
legalities. One of the top films of the
year alongside David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai which
ultimately took home the Best Picture statue, Sayonara still holds value
for modern moviegoers as a historical romantic drama steeped in postwar Japan
at a time when the gulf between division and loving partnership started to coalesce.
--Andrew Kotwicki
