50s Movie said Sayonara to at least one "ism"

I recently finished watching Sayonara, a 1957 romance starring Marlon Brando that took four of the ten Oscars for which it was nominated. I rented the movie after catching a few minutes on television, so I only had some idea of what to expect. Had I known that it was based on a James Michener novel, I might have been less surprised at the overall quality of the story, but given the era in which it was produced, I did start watching it with some trepidation.

The movie is not without its flaws, starting with the celebrated lead actor himself. At the beginning of the movie, Brando is at his method acting worst, struggling to emote about the horrors of war and slurring his southern drawl to the point of unintelligibility. While his dialogue becomes more clear over time, the lack of English subtitles on the DVD is missed. This quibble aside, Brando ably carries the movie, and the transformation of his character’s attitudes about Americans marrying Japanese is conveyed in a believable manner, not to mention the growth in his appreciation of Japanese culture.

Various aspects of Japanese culture receive generous amounts of screen time, but the novelty value of seeing bunraku, kabuki, and tea ceremony performances from the fifties is mitigated by how they bring the story to a standstill for a few minutes at a time. It's almost as if the Japanese Travel Bureau bankrolled the movie in exchange for a series of "product" placements.

My only other complaint is not having Ricardo Montalban playing a Japanese character, but the occasional scenes that are carried almost completely by dialogue when the plot could have been dramatized in other ways. For example, Brando’s love interest, Hana-ogi (Miiko Taka), goes from hating to loving American men in a single monologue that could have been better handled by showing Brando’s character winning her over during a date or something similar. Set the aforementioned complaints aside, and you end up with a movie well worth watching.

Although the typical staple of a Hollywood romance, the love triangle, can be found in Sayonara, here it serves as a convenient way to introduce enough characters to examine how lingering post-war hostility combined with racism threatened the marriages of American servicemen to Japanese women. The frankness in which the subject is handled may surprise some twenty-first century viewers who think of the fifties as a time strictly devoted to wholesome family entertainment, and it lends the movie enough gravitas to satisfy an audience in 2011.

As much credit as Sayonara deserves for its treatment of racism, it dates itself with its unabashed sexism. Joe Kelly’s (Red Buttons) marriage to Katsumi (Miyoshi Umeki) is portrayed in terms bordering on male fantasy. She happily scrubs his back while he bathes, feeds him, pours his sake, and considers the latest methods in plastic surgery all in an effort to please her man. To Kelly’s credit, he tells Katsumi not to get the surgery to make her eyes look more American, because he loves his "stupid dame" just the way she is. Of course, this profession of love comes after he emphatically repeats he will “kill her” if she ever thinks of going under the knife again.

So, the movie is by no means perfect, and in some aspects it hasn’t aged well. Yet as an artifact of Japanese-American relations in the late fifties it makes for a fascinating document. After watching it, seek out Yasujiro Ozu’s own 1957 offering, Tokyo Twilight, for a gritty, realistic portrait of a Japanese woman struggling against more challenges than any human should have to bear. Ozu’s movie will shatter any illusions of idealized Japanese femininity that Sayonara seeks to create and serve as a fitting companion piece.