Flower Drum Song

TCM is running a night of movies based on Rogers and Hammerstein musicals tonight, and that gives me a chance to blog about a movie that's currently on my DVR from the last time it aired: Flower Drum Song, airing overnight at 3:30 AM.

The movie opens up with a boat sailing in to the harbor in San Francisco, and two people looking out one of the portholes of the boat. However, it's soon revealed that these two people are in fact stowaways down in the cargo hold. They're Chinese immigrants, entering the country through extralegal means because they can't afford to wait the 10 years the nationality quotas would have them wait.

Those two are Mei Li (Miyoshi Umeki) and her father, Dr. Li (Kam Ton), a Ph.D. professor from a university in Beijing (no mention is made of Communist China, but the references all indicate the movie is supposed to be set well after 1949). They have a letter of introduction, but it's in Chinese and they don't know where they're supposed to go. Fortunately, when they get stopped by the police, someone in the crowd can translate the letter for the cop.

They're looking for one Sammy Fong (Jack Soo), who now owns a prominent nightclub in Chinatown. Many years back, Fong and Mei Li were betrothed in one of those old-style, presumably pre-Communist, arranged marriages. Sammy wasn't expecting the Lis to show up for years yet, so their arrival is quite the surprise. It's also a problem, because in the meantime Sammy has fallen in love with one of the singers at his club, Linda Low (Nancy Kwan), although he's been a bit remiss in stringing Linda along, probably because not marrying the person in the marriage contract would present a big problem. And what to do with poor Mei anyway?

Fong is fortunate enough to know a well-to-do man in Chinatown who has a son of marriageable age. Wang Chi-Yang (Benson Fong) is a widower with two sons, the elder of whom Wang Ta (James Shigeta) is about to finish college which would make it just the right time to start thinking about settling down to start a family. Fong gets the Lis servant positions in the Wang household, but Ta and Mei meet before they're supposed to be "officially" introduced to one another. Mei immediately falls for Ta, but much worse is that Ta meets Linda and falls in love with her. There's also a third woman who might be interested in Ta, even though we know from the conventions of Hollywood love triangles that she has no chance considering how far down the credits list she is.

And at this point the movie devolves, if you will, into a standard studio-era romantic comedy. Not that this is a bad thing, as Hollywood in those days produced any number of nice romantic comedies with love triangles like this. It's more a question of how the movie will get to what everyone hopes is the requisite happy ending. That, and the musical numbers since this is, after all based on a stage musical.

Flower Drum Song does what it does well, although 60 years on some people are definitely going to have problems with the movie and how it portrays an idealized Hollywood version of Chinatown and the Chinese-American community. That, and the fact that some of the actors playing Chinese-Americans are of Japanese descent. For me, not all of the musical number choreography works; the highlight is the song "I Enjoy Being a Girl" which is probably the closest to a standard the musical produced.

What I liked about Flower Drum Song is how is implies that the clash of generations, as well as the clash of desires between what immigrants want for the children and their American-born children want as being universal things. In that regard, a particularly humorous scene for me was where Sammy shows Mei how he spends his night, which includes a visit to a club with Chinese-American beatniks! Hollywood never did know how to handle the late-50s counterculture.

So while Flower Drum Song does have its share of flaws, I think the positives more than outweigh the negatives.