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Director: Joshua Logan
Writers: Paul Osborn (screenplay), James Michener (novel)
Cast: Marlon Brando, Miiko Taka, Miyoshi Umeki, Red Buttons, Ricardo Montalban, Patricia Owens
Genre: Drama, Romance
About: A U.S. Air Force Major (Marlon Brando) who opposes his friends upcoming wedding to a Japanese woman, falls in love with a beautiful Japanese dancer and runs afoul of the U.S. Air Force who discriminates against US men and their Japanese wives.
Review: Based on the James Michener novel of the same name, the movie was a big budget film shot in wide screen Technirama and on location in Japan. The film is a melodrama about two American service men both who fall in love with Japanese women, which at the time was strongly being discouraged by the the U.S. armed forces.
Red Buttons is excellent in this as an everyday enlisted service man who holds his ground and fights great odds to have a normal life with his Japaneses wife. The actress playing his wife is Miyoshi Umeki, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. This made her the first Asian actor to ever win an Oscar. Later she would endear herself to millions as the housekeeper in TV's The Courtship of Eddie's Father.
Miiko Taka is the love interest for Marlon Brando's character and she is quite good in this and very lovely.
I was impressed that all the key Japanese actors were indeed played by Asians, with the sole exception being Ricardo Montalban playing a Japanese dancer, which really seemed out of place in this otherwise authentic looking production.
I'm sorry to say that Marlon Brando stunk in this movie.... Right off the bat he had this really stupid southern accent and a country bumpkin persona that didn't match his character's background, which was a West Point educated, son of a General. And he generally acted like an idiot who didn't care what was going on around him and that's 180 away from what his characters motivations were.
So after the movie I did some reading at IMDB and was amazed to read this:
But what really pissed me off was when I read what Brando had said about Sayonara in an interview:
This is from IMDB:
And that is sacrilege for any actor to do to a movie...But even with Marlon Brando thumbing his nose at the audience, this is still a worth while film to see for it's cutting edge interracial subject matter.
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Sayonara (1957)
Writers: Paul Osborn (screenplay), James Michener (novel)
Cast: Marlon Brando, Miiko Taka, Miyoshi Umeki, Red Buttons, Ricardo Montalban, Patricia Owens
Genre: Drama, Romance
About: A U.S. Air Force Major (Marlon Brando) who opposes his friends upcoming wedding to a Japanese woman, falls in love with a beautiful Japanese dancer and runs afoul of the U.S. Air Force who discriminates against US men and their Japanese wives.
Review: Based on the James Michener novel of the same name, the movie was a big budget film shot in wide screen Technirama and on location in Japan. The film is a melodrama about two American service men both who fall in love with Japanese women, which at the time was strongly being discouraged by the the U.S. armed forces.
Red Buttons is excellent in this as an everyday enlisted service man who holds his ground and fights great odds to have a normal life with his Japaneses wife. The actress playing his wife is Miyoshi Umeki, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. This made her the first Asian actor to ever win an Oscar. Later she would endear herself to millions as the housekeeper in TV's The Courtship of Eddie's Father.
Miiko Taka is the love interest for Marlon Brando's character and she is quite good in this and very lovely.
I was impressed that all the key Japanese actors were indeed played by Asians, with the sole exception being Ricardo Montalban playing a Japanese dancer, which really seemed out of place in this otherwise authentic looking production.
I'm sorry to say that Marlon Brando stunk in this movie.... Right off the bat he had this really stupid southern accent and a country bumpkin persona that didn't match his character's background, which was a West Point educated, son of a General. And he generally acted like an idiot who didn't care what was going on around him and that's 180 away from what his characters motivations were.
So after the movie I did some reading at IMDB and was amazed to read this:
... Marlon Brando insisted on playing Ace Gruver with a Southern accent, against the will of the director and producers. Brando adopted a nondescript Southern accent for Gruver, despite the objections of director Joshua Logan, who didn't think that a general's son who was West Point-educated would speak that way.
This is from IMDB:
Marlon Brando said in his interview with The New Yorker... "Man, I rewrote the whole damn script. And now out of that they're going to use maybe eight lines. I give up. I'm going to walk through the part, and that's that. Sometimes I think nobody knows the difference anyway. For the first few days on the set, I tried to act. But then I made an experiment. In this scene, I tried to do everything wrong I could think of. Grimaced and rolled my eyes, put in all kind of gestures and expressions that had no relation to the part I'm supposed to be playing. What did Logan say? He just said, 'It's wonderful. Print it!'"
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