Mongkut and I

Among the movies that has recently started running in the FXM rotation is Anna and the King of Siam. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM, and again Friday morning, so I made it a point to watch this weekend to do a post on it.

Irene Dunne plays Anna Owens, a British woman who, as the opening titles inform us, traveled to Siam (now Thailand) to take on the job of teaching the English language and Western knowledge to the children of King Mongkut (Rex Harrison), all 67 of them. Mongkut has seen what was happening in other parts of Asia, with Western countries coming in and turning the places into colonies, and he absolutely doesn't want that to happen to him and his people. So to that end he's trying to modernize and has brought in a Western tutor for that purpose.

Now, as I mentioned, the King has 67 children, and a bunch of wives, all of whom live in a harem within the palace. It's just one of the many vast cultural differences between Siam and the West, something that goes both ways as Mongkut doesn't always get western traditions and Anna and her son certainly don't understand the Siamese. Indeed, Anna gaffes on her first day in Bangkok, when she meets Mongkut's chief advisor Kralahome (Lee J. Cobb).

When Anna is housed in separate quarters within the palace, she begins to learn what she's up against. She meets the king's first wife, Lady Thiang (Gale Sondergaard), who is also the mother of the Crown Prince. However, the king has taken many other wives since then, including his current favorite, Tuptim (Linda Darnell). Thiang has reached the point thta she just wants what's best for her son, since she knows she's not going to get what she needs from the king.

With that many wives, there's all sorts of palace intrigue going on, and adding a western woman into the mix isn't going to make things easier for anybody. Whether Anna was that much of a fighter for women's equality by western standards might be up for debate, but compared to the king's harem, she absolutely was, being horrified by the treatment of the wives and how everybody is expected to prostrate themselves before the king. But at the same time, Anna fails to understand that sudden social upheaval causes all sorts of problems of its own.

By this time, Mongkut has learned that the western powers are looking on Siam as backward, and he is desparate to dispel that image, so he decides to invite a bunch of representatives from various European countries to show them that Siam can be just as western as Europe, and convince them to have equal diplomatic relations with Siam rather than to try to colonize the place. History tells us that this more or less worked, as Siam (and Japan) were much closer to equals with Europe than any other place in Asia; Siam wouldn't really be colonized until the Japanese came along in World War II.

Anybody looking back at Anna and the King of Siam 75 years after it was released is going to have issues with it, I think. As with any Hollywood historical movie or biopic, there's the question of how much the movie is playing fast and loose with history. The fact that this movie is based on a fictional novelization of Anna Leonowens, who had published a memoir back in the 1870s, doesn't help. Others will point out the yellowface, although I'm not certain how much of a Southeast Asian population there was in the US in 1946, even if the studio had wanted to strive for as much accuracy as possible. In the years just after World War II, having Japanese-Americans or Chinese-Americans play Southeast Asians really wouldn't have been any better, I think.

One thing I think the movie is at least trying to be conscientious about is the difficulty King Mongkut finds himself facing in having an outside world encroaching on him. It made me think of The Barbarian and the Geisha, about Japan's being forced open to the world after 250 years of being almost entirely shut off. Of course some of Mongkut's attempts are going to look silly and foolish, but he also didn't have too many options.

As for the acting, Irene Dunne is unsurprisingly good, since she gets to play a westerner. Everybody else faces the difficulty of being white people playing Asian. Sondergaard and Darnell both do reasonably well, since it's easy enough to compare them to the wives and ladies-in-waiting behind any western throne. Lee J. Cobb is surprisingly sympathetic, even if he looks terribly miscast and it's hard to shake off roles like Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront as you're watching. Rex Harrison, unfortunately, came off as a bit of a buffoon, and was for me the weak spot of the movie.

Anna and the King of Siam, for all its flaws, is still an interesting movie, in part for its look at how Hollywood tried to navigate a complex and to them exotic history back in the mid-1940s.