Teahouse of the August Moon

If you think about it, Glenn Ford made a surprising number of war movies and service comedies over the course of his career. One that I hadn't seen before, so recorded the last time it showed up on TCM, was The Teahouse of the August Moon. Having watched it, I can finally do a review of it here.

After the opening credits, we get a scene that's going to be rather off-putting for a lot of viewers: that of Marlon Brando as Sakini, a Japanese man who can speak English and lives on the island of Okinawa in 1946. This is not long after the surrender of Japan ending World War II, and Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu Islands extending southwest from the Home Islands were put under a greater level of American control than the rest of the country. Sakini tells us how the locals are very good at learning from all the foreign occupations that have befallen his islands, and basically taking the best of it without the occupiers knowing what's really going on.

Cut to the officious Col. Purdy (Paul Ford). He's been given orders to bring the best of America to Okinawa in order to pacify the islands, but finds out that things are decidedly not going to plan. So he needs someone new to implement those plans. Thankfully, he's getting someone new to work under him in the form of Capt. Fisby (Glen Ford). Fisby is a bit of an incompetent at best, and maybe a bit of a dishonest if well-intentioned schemer at worst, having been drummed out of a bunch of other outfits in the Army before being reassigned to a backwater like Col. Purdy's bailiwick. Fisby's duty is to go to a village called Tobiki, and with the help of his interpreter Sakini, get a school built and a ladies' democracy league started.

As I mentioned, the locals are clever at gaming the system, and they don't really need a new school. What they want is to replace the old teahouse, a place where geisha would entertain men, and something that would presumably be good for tourism to the island, not that there was much tourism in 1946. They're going to need to rebuild the economy, however, and Fisby looks for some form of local industry. Back in those days, however, Made in Japan was the same sort of symbol of low-quality cheapness that Made in China is today, so none of the stuff they manufacture helps until it's discovered that the Okinawans are good as making certain distilled spirits.

Meanwhile, Fisby is growing to like the locals, and taking on some of their cultural mores, which is rather a no-no considering that he's got Army orders to get that school built. It isn't getting built, and Purdy is wondering what's taking so long, so he digs up an Army psychologist, Capt. McLean (Eddie Albert) to investigate what's going on. McLean is shocked at first to see what's happened to Fisby, but he too soon comes around to the locals' point of view.

In some ways, it would be easy to see The Teahouse of the August Moon as being a much more comedic version of a movie like A Bell for Adano, and set in Japan instead of Italy. But there was a lot more about it that didn't work for me. Everybody will virtue signal about how terrible it was to have Marlon Brando play Okinawan. But for me, even if the character had been played by someone Japanese I still would have hated the character: Sakini reminded me a lot of the character Barry Fitzgerald played in The Quiet Man, giving John Wayne a bunch of BS when Wayne simply wanted to get where he was going. It's supposed to be charming, but in real life such people are terribly tedious, and that makes The Teahouse of the August Moon a slog to get through.