Another of the movies that I have on my DVR which is getting another airing soon on TCM is A Majority of One. That next airing comes up tomorrow, December 3, at 10:00 AM.
In late 1950s brooklyn, Bertha Jacoby (Rosalind Russell) is a Jewish widow living in Brooklyn and displaying all of the stereotypes Hollywood had about Jewish mothers in those days. Her husband died some time back while her adult son was killed in action in the Pacific theater of World War II. She's got an adult daughter, Alice (Madlyn Rhue), who is married to Jerry Black (Ray Danton); he works for the US Foreign Service.
Jerry's job has the young couple moving from country to country as US foreign service officers do, and he's just about to get a new posting: to Japan, where he's going to be serving as a junior member of a committee negotiating a major trade deal with Japanese industrialists. Now that Jerry's mother-in-law is getting up in years, he and Alice suggest that she come along to the young couple with Japan. In the 2020s this would make no sense since Bertha can clearly support herself, but the past is, as they say, a foreign country.
The three fly to the west coast and then take a boat for the voyage across the Pacific. Among the fellow passengers on the boat is Koichi Asano (Alec Guinness). He's a Japanese businessman who meets Bertha and her family, and enjoys Bertha's company. Except that there's a catch, which is that Bertha still has a major issue with the Japanese, what with them being responsible in her mind for her son's death. Then again, Koichi lost his daughter when the Americans dropped that atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so the two are equal, in a way. A bigger problem, however, is for Jerry and Alice. Bertha doesn't work for the foreign service, so she may not be aware of how taking gifts from someone you'll be doing business with might be an issue. Bertha doesn't think anything of Koichi's kindess, but Jerry sees the possibility of Koichi trying to influence the negotations as Koichi is one of Japan's bigger industrialists.
So Bertha drops all contact with Koichi and arrives to Japan a very lonely woman since she doesn't know the language or the culture, and has no reason to be going out to diplomatic functions the way Alice would at least. And then things get far worse when the negotiations on that trade treaty go south and Koichi intimates that Jerry is responsible for the failure of this. Eventually, Bertha realizes that she has to try to put things right again in the name of international frienship.
Her gesture works in one way, but in another produces an even bigger personal problem. Koichi and Bertha like each other enough that Koichi is willing to suggest that the two "keep company" together, which is a euphemism for the first steps toward a marriage proposal. That seems utterly out of the blue, and Jerry and Alice are shocked, because this sort of cross-cultural relationship just isn't going to work, is it?
A lot will have been written in more recent reviews of A Majority of One of the utter horror of having a British man like Alec Guinness playing a Japanese man: yellowface, and all that. Perhaps the screenwriter (Leonard Spiegelglass, based on his stage play) could have written Koichi as the son of a Japanese diplomat who married a western while posted abroad; think Carroll Baker in Bridge to the Sun, which was based on a true story. Surprisingly, much less mention -- and certainly not offense -- is given to one of Hollywood's old arch-Catholics playing the Jewish mother.
In any case, the problems I had with A Majority of One weren't because of the casting, but more down to the writing. The issue that causes the whole diplomatic rift between Koichi and Jerry turns out to be something unrealistically petty. And Koichi and Bertha fall for each other much too quickly. Another problem is that the movie is much too long at 148 minutes; it probably should have been trimmed by a good 40 minutes or so as it's way too slow.
A Majority of One may be interesting as a period piece, but it's not a terribly great movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment