Sayonara
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Movie Reviews of Sayonara
Movie Review: An exceptional movie of postwar Japan and American relations
Summary: 5 Stars
Sayonara is a story that was bold in the 1950s but to those of us living in the 21st century, it may seem old and outdated. Some of it may be a little casual - the lack of serious Japanese male actors, but the central theme of the story is still important. Marlon Brando, Red Buttons and James Garner are Americans, assigned to Japan after combat in Korea, with interests in Japanese women. Brando has an American fiancee whom it is apparent he is ambivilent about marrying - he seems to have been engaged for a very long time. Garner, as a Marine aviator, has a Japanese lady friend who is a professional dancer and Buttons his fiance that he wants to marry - regardless of the rules that make it difficult if not impossible to have a successful marriage.
Brando coming to Japan from Korea needs a break. He is starting to be troubled by what he is doing. He remarks to Buttons that one of his most recent aerial victories was over a man with a face. Appparently his previous victories were done at a long enough range that it didn't become so personal. This time it was different and is staying with him.
I think it it the story of Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki that is the most pivotal part of the story. They have the courage to get married and face the future as a couple. Brando's ambivilance to his fiancee finally causes him to walk away from her and hook up with Garner in the officer's club bar. They had become acquainted when Garner attempted to bring his Japanese guest into the officer's club and was refused permission to do so. Through Garner, Brando becomes interested in another famous professional dancer, Miiko Taka, and he begins a quest to meet her. He asks Buttons and Umeki to introduce him to Hana Ogi and the initial attempt is less than successful. Hana Ogi says she doesn't talk to Americans because during the war her brother and father were killed by the Americans. Brando is astonished by this thinking as he says he didn't kill them (guilt by association) and then Garner adds a telling and resonating comment "yes you did, we all did". Garner's role understands that in the eyes of Japanese all Americans participated in the leveling of Japanese cities and the starvation of the people through submarine warfare. It didn't matter if the servicemen they saw were in Europe during the war or were even to young to have fought there but were doing their two years service obligation (draft). At their first meeting she is stiff but soon becomes comfortable in Brando's presence.
Buttons has become the center of a campaign to transfer enlisted men who have married Japanese women and gets orders to return to the US. Brando, one of the few people he respects, tries to get the orders changed without success. Even the pregnancy of Button's wife has no effect on the decision. Faced with a life of seperation, suicide is their answer. This is after Umeki has the idea of having her eyelids slashed so that after the surgery they look like an AMerican woman. It is sad and frustrating to think that in the real world it was done as the flyer described that Umeki had in her hands. The musical accompaniment to Brando finding their bodies is extremely moving in this scene and is something I have remembered since I first saw this movie over forty years ago. Brando's performance as the grief stricken friend is superb - you can almost feel his pain and then anger as his ex-future father-in-law general tells him that the law is being changed and soon men like Buttons can bring Japanese wives to the US. It is a little late for Buttons and his wife though.
After the deaths of thier friends, Hana Ogi is moved to Tokyo by her company (afterall no matter how popular she is with the public, she is still an employee) Brando follows and it is there that they decide to face the offical displeasure of both countries and marry although it is extremely difficult for Hana Ogi to make the decision to turn her back on age old customs and traditions. Hana Ogi's description of how she came to be a dancer is chilling. I think she sees the difficult future much more clearly than Brando's character. yet they both are willing to take the risk.
There is another relationship that isn't discussed and that is the role of Eileen Webster (Brando's fiancee) and the kabuki dancer Nakamura. She has dinner with him, both with and without Brando and the topic of Brando's relationship with a famous Japanese dancer is discussed and in Nakamura's case discounted. Yet when Brando makes the announcement to the Webster family that he wants to marry a Japanese woman, Eileen walks out. Her mother asks her to stay and talk and Eileen responds that the only person she wants to talk to is Japanese - Nakamura. This could have been a much more intriguing situation. It was relatively common for American men to date and marry Japanese women. What would the reaction have been to the developing relationship between a Japanese man and an American woman? I think that has more societal impact for the late 1950s than an American man and Japanese woman.
Throughout the film the entire cast is extremely effective, from Buttons' enthusiasm over his future wife to Garner's anger at not being able to take a Japanese guest into the Officer's club. It all feels quite real. Look at the small details as Brando is waiting for Taka as she passes over a bridge every day to her performance. He makes an impression on her inspite of her resistance. This is a look at Japanese culture as well as the US military culture. Ricardo Montalban as a kabuki actor is exceptional - he deserved an academy award nomination as well as Buttons. James Garner is also exceptional as the Marine Corps aviator who is at first antagonistic to Brando but later introduces him to Japan outside of the officer's club. His performance is very under rated and deserves much greater praise.
The musical score of the movie is outstanding and has a very positive impact on the film scenes. Without this score I'm not sure how well the film would have been.
Oddly enough, some of the same themes from this film are resonating in my personal life as I am living in Japan. Some of the same issues that are raised in the film were ones that my wife to be had after I asked her to marry me. The issue of children especially resonated and still does from time to time. Her concern about what the child will be and all I can say is that it will be ours. I showed Rumi the last few minutes of the film and it had a powerful impression on her. It also showed her that her questions and concerns were not unique - that they have been discussed and argued over for decades.
It is a movie that does not end happily - maybe it ends hopefully is a better summary, as Brando and Taka take on the officials of Japan and the US. You think it will work but you don't know for sure.
Another point to think about is that in the 40s and 50s - a number of states had laws that forbid bi-racial marriages. A friend of my father's in the Navy had orders to a state where such a law was in operation and had to leave his Japanese wife and bi-racial son in Japan while he was doing his assignment in the US. The best the Navy could do was to give him as short an assignment as possible in the US and then hopen to get him back to Japan close to it - Guam, Korea, The Philippines or Vietnam. If Brando could take his Japanese wife back to the US - would he run afoul of state laws forbidding bi-racial marriages since many bases of the US military were located in the states where these laws were on the books - if not enfource.
This is a must see film for anyone interested in the military of the 1950s and the impact on Japan of the US and vice versa.
Movie Review: Sayonara, some questions answered.
Summary: 5 Stars
Sayonara follows Air Force officer Lloyd (Marlon Brando) who is conveniently transferred from Korea to Kobe, Japan in hopes that he will wed a Generals daughter. Being unsure of his feelings on marriage, Lloyd soon becomes attracted to a famous dancer named Hana Ogi (Miko Tanaka) who has issues of her own. The other sub plot in the film involves Lloyds friend Kelly (Red Buttons) who faces prejudice and bullying from his commanding officer for marrying his frowned upon Japanese wife Katsumi (Miyoshi Umeki). Both Buttons and Umeki won best supporting actor and actress Oscars for this film.
Yes the film, despite being a love story, spends a lot of time exploring racism against the Japanese. As some reviewers have pointed out, the Japanese were also very racist. That fact is only touched on in one scene where Mr. Nakamura (the only real Japanese man shown in the film and played interestingly enough by a very young Ricado Montalban) mentions that some of his own countrymen are not too terribly enthusiastic about international relationships. Granted, in a film which tries to juggle the beauty of Japan, racism and a love story, there is hardly time to explore the Japanese view point. One does wonder how Red Buttons wife's parents reacted to their daughter Katsumi marrying an American? Had Marlon Brando's love interest Hana Ogi's family lived surely they would not have been pleased with her giving up her famous career to marry a foreigner. Sadly none of these things are examined and may have been a flaw in a film trying to combat such a serious issue.
Mika Tanaka who portrays Brando's girlfriend was actually an American born into a wealthy Japanese family from Washington State. That's why her command of English is so good. Her character of Hana Ogi is a famous dancer in the Matsubayashi Girls dancing troupe. She explains to Brando in one heartfelt scene that she owes her life to the troupe and that her responsibility is to grow old and become a teacher for future dancers. There were no actual "Matsubayashi Girls" but the film invents the troupe as a serious, harshly governed, traditional group of girls who ironically perform Las Vegas style shows.Such dancers doing modern style dances for American G.I.'s were no doubt plentiful in post war Japan. However these girls came from a much less structured and governed group unlike the film would have you believe. In other words, the Geisha didn't go running off and put on tap shoes. The film's credits list the Matsubayahi girls as played by the Shochiku Comany dancers. Shochiku is still a well known movie company today but their days of promoting dancers, if in fact they ever did, are long since gone. I have reason to suspect that they were created just for this film.
The film is shot in Itami City,Kyoto, Kobe, Osaka, Ise and Tokyo. One of my favorite scenes is Marlon Brando on the beach in Ise, admiring the "wedding rocks" while James Garner waits behind him in a jeep.........a good 100 km away in Arashiyama!
Most modern Japanese have never heard of the film Sayonara. The small group of Japanese adults that I know who did watch this film to were surprised and embarrassed by the level of servitude that Katsumi gave to Red Buttons. They also laughed at the fact that most of the Japanese women in the film adopted a very flat accent which was very typical of old T.V. dramas at the time.Like many movies of their time shot in Japan, Americans are portrayed with the "how could anyone not love us"? attitude.
The original 1957 movie program (Japanese) does mention that there was another ending to the film or rather, the ending was left out. In Japan, it seems, the last 5 minutes of the film wasn't shown in Japan. Weather it was cut, or another scene was shot later for American audiences, the program doesn't say. If there are other versions, they weren't shown in Japan.
One final note, which is probably THE SADDEST of all concerns Miyoshi Umeki who won a best supporting actress for this film. She started her career as a singer and changed her name briefly to Nancy Umeki before being hired for Sayonara. After winning the Oscar, she moved to the U.S. and did many bit parts in movies and t.v. Most people might remember her in the U.S. playing Mrs. Livingston opposite Bill Bixby in the short lived T.V. drama "The Courtship of Eddies Father". Despite being the first Asian and the first Japanese to win an Oscar, she is virtually unknown in Japan. One would think that in Japan they would celebrate such an honored person but sadly the old generation barely remembers her and the new one has never heard of her. Oscar shows in Japan, at lest the last 10 years that I have watched, have never mentioned her. Miyoshi died in August of 2007 and there was very little about her death in Japan.
Movie Review: Happy Ending, Tragedy
Summary: 5 Stars
4 1/2 starsShakespeare's rule - "happy ending, comedy; unhappy ending, tragedy" - does not apply to Sayonara. It is one of the saddest movies I've ever seen.
Set in Japan in 1951, towards the end of the U.S. occupation, and during the Korean War, Sayonara tells of American men thousands of miles away from home, and the forbidden Japanese women they meet, and fall in love with.
At the time, servicemen were forbidden from fraternizing with Japanese women, but like the song says, "If you can't be/With the one you love/Well, then, love the one you're with." And in all fairness, many a G.I. met the love of his life while in uniform on foreign soil.
The story sets up a parallel between two rigidly hierarchical, intolerant societies: The U.S. Army and Japan.
Marlon Brando plays Maj. Lloyd "Ace" Gruver, the reigning ace and golden boy of the Army Air Force. "Ace" is the son of a four-star general, and destined himself for general officer status, as long as he plays by the rules. Gruver is an amiably racist Southerner whose world is about to be turned upside down. (One glaring historical error in Sayonara, is its making Gruver a flier in the Army Air Force. The Army Air Force ceased to exist in 1947, when it became the fully independent branch, the U.S. Air Force. The error may have been deliberate, since a brand, spanking new service branch could not be depicted as bound to tradition.)
Gruver is confronted with racial conflict through one of his men, Airman Joe "Red" Kelly (played by carrot-topped Jew, Red Buttons). Red asks Gruver, his C.O., to witness his marriage. Gruver does not seek to hide his racism, and as per Army regulations, seeks to talk Kelly out of the union. He emphasizes that Kelly will not be able to take his wife stateside with him, should he be assigned to return home. Kelly says he will never leave the woman he loves, and demands and receives an apology from the officer. This scene is designed to set up the conflict to come, and to show Gruver's profound decency, and the loyalty he feels to his men. In Japan, Gruver witnesses the wedding, and even kisses the bride.
Japan is a traditional society and Gruver, the product of Army tradition, is himself locked in a semi-arranged marriage to a three-star general's daughter, a wonderful, intelligent, beautiful young woman ("Eileen Webster," played by Patricia Owens). But is he really in love with her?
Gruver becomes smitten with Japan's most famous musical actress, "Hana-ogi" (Miiko Taka), and pursues her. Meanwhile, his fiancé becomes attracted to the country's greatest kabuki actor ("Nakamura," played by Ricardo Montalban, an Hispanic; imagine the reaction by Asian ethnic hustlers to such casting today!).
Meanwhile, a racist colonel decides to make the lives of soldiers who have fallen in love with Japanese girls a living hell.
Sayonara was up for a heap of Oscars, but only won two. It lost out on most of the awards, because it was up against The Bridge on the River Kwai, another movie about the collision of Japan and the West, which happened to be one of the greatest movies ever made. The two Oscars Sayonara did win, went to Red Buttons and Miyeshi Umeki (as Red Kelly's Japanese bride, "Katsumi"), as Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively. As moving as these two performers were, I'm not sure Buttons deserved the award over Sessue Hayakawa's performance as Col. Saito in Kwai. However, without giving away too much, the circumstances of Buttons and Umeki's performances won them their Oscars, just as much as their performances did.
Sayonara is filled out by a congenial performance by a young James Garner, as Marine Corps "Capt. Mike Bailey," who befriends Gruver, and workmanlike performances by Martha Scott and Kent Smith as Gruver's prospective mother-in-law and her spineless husband, and Douglass Watson as the racist colonel, respectively. While modestly effective in her more intimate scenes, Miiko Taka performs with much more self-assurance in her musical stage numbers.
In 1957, Marlon Brando was on top of the world. Having not yet suffered the egotistical meltdown that would make him both personally and professionally unreliable for the rest of his career (see Apocalypse Now, etc.), at the time he could play anything but Shakespeare.
There is clearly a liberal message here: We can triumph over racism, if we can reach through to the core decency of people who were raised in a racist culture. And I believe that Sayonara went too easy on the Japanese, who at their best were as racist as we were, at our worst.
Either you will feel bullied by Sayonara's underlying liberal pieties, or it will break your heart. It broke mine.
P.S. The barebones DVD contains only the 1957 theatrical trailer.
Originally published on November 29, 2003, in The Critical Critic.
Movie Review: Watch it for this one scene, if nothing else.
Summary: 5 Stars
I was seven years old when this movie came out in 1957, but I had never heard of it until one day recently I accidentally caught the end of it on FLIX. I have since watched it over and over -- something I rarely do with any film. Others I have asked also had never heard of it.
This film is undeserving of such obscurity; it's a wonderful movie that just captivates me. But there's one scene in this film that is a high example of the filmmaker's art. This scene, in its perfection, is the most powerfully romantic movie scene I have ever beheld. Even after watching it many times, it still leaves me shaking! Wow! This scene transcends story telling with film; it is literature.
It evokes something from Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), or Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy). That is to say, the scene portrays something vital about the human experience. At least it does for me; but then, I admit I'm a sucker for stories of love between American men and Asian women.
The scene to which I refer is when Lloyd Gruver (Marlon Brando) encounters Hana-ogi in Joe Kelly's (Red Buttons) house. It begins when he opens the sliding door and sees her kneeling, erect, serene, and dignified, waiting for him to arrive. If not on the first watching, then on the second, fourth, or eleventh watching, one will become aware that the lighting, the sound, the furnishings of the room, her hair, her kimonos, her makeup (especially her painted lips) are all perfect. What an ambiance! What a setting for a man and a woman to fall in love!
Gruver is immediately struck by her presence; this is plain to see. Nevertheless, he recovers his usual demeanor and proceeds to try to make small talk, his mind and body regarding this lovely creature with respect and admiration, but also lust. She just sits there, regarding him without moving, without even blinking, betraying no thoughts or emotions. His discomfort rises.
Then, when it is time and not before, she begins to speak. She speaks word of deep humanity, compassion, wisdom, and sincerity. The power of her words is greatly enhanced by the quiet dignity with which she speaks them. Gruver is dumbfounded, and Brando plays this role very well. You can see on his face (Flaubert or Tolstoy would have painted the picture with words) that his life, unexpectedly, has just been bifurcated. There is now the life before this encounter, and what will come after. He can never again be the same man -- he can never again regard women the same; Hana-ogi is a new paradigm. He never looked for such a thing before, because he never imagined such a woman or such a feeling could exist.
Some people continue to insist such love themes are racist. That is absurd. It is the antithesis of racism. This is the profoundest love flourishing in spite of different races and cultures, and the inevitable perils incumbent with this relationship in this place at this time. This is love between a man and a woman, as unfettered by affectations and expectations as love can be. This is the raw, real thing, and this film tells this tale, exquisitely done.
Movie Review: Wonderful story...
Summary: 5 Stars
When I was a teenager, James Michner was publishing his early books, "Fires of Spring" "Tales from the South Pacific" "Bridges at Toko-Ri" "Sayonara" "Until They Sail" and "Hawaii." I saved my allowance and bought all these books, and though I've traveled extensively and moved many times, I've hung onto them. They affected my life more than anything else I've read, and they point to the fact that the issues so often seen as "arising" in the 1960s (racism, sexism, pacifism) were really issues in the 1950s. Sayonara stars Marlon Brando as Major Lloyd Gruber, a U.S. Air Force field officer stationed in Japan, who is destined to follow in his father's footsteps and become one of the "joint chiefs" if he plays his cards right. Toward that end, his father does not want him to do anything to jeopardize his career--especially the unthinkable--marry "indigeous personnel" as the Japanese were called in U.S. occupied Japan. Lloyd is to marry a young woman who is the daughter of a fellow senior officer. I won't tell you how the story develops but just say the book and the film are different.
James Michener was in the Navy and he married a Japanese woman. He went on to teach English in Texas and put together a handsome collection of Japanese prints when they were inexpensive. Michener never forgot his WWII experiences and he captured them in his books. In the fifties, military personnel began to marry War Brides as they were called. By the 1960s when I was a Marine officer's wife, many of my fellow wives were from foreign countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. I did not understand why the U.S. had race problems since the military was so well integrated--at least in base housing.
One of the most touching sights I recall from those days was the Japanese wives leaving the PX theater in tears after the showing of Sayonara, which was playing in military theaters 20 years after it opened. This is a beautiful film, and shows a Japan that is still recovering from the aftermath of war, but nevertheless beautiful. It is difficult to understand how the people who created the tea ceremony could also have produced such fierce warriors. It's important to remember that Sayonara takes place a mere 8 years after the end of WWII. The Bataan Death March and other atrocities were still pretty fresh, and yet the American public loved this film and loved Michener's books. Their response says much about their ability to forgive.