Shirley MacLaine stars as an American star playing a Japanese actress in ‘My Geisha,’ an entertaining film for its time, even with all of its politically incorrect attitudes.
The Sixties were a weird, tumultuous time in the United States, at least the mid-to-late Sixties. Just before that time when we still had a bit of innocence left, it was a time when it didn’t seem to ruffle any feathers when an American actor played a character of another race. Jerry Lewis got away with his grotesque Japanese caricature for years, and both Mickey Rooney and Marlon Brando played Japanese characters on the big screen (and, yes, there was some outcry from the Asian community, but their voices were rarely heard at the time).
Heck, German-born Luise Rainier even won an Oscar for portraying a Chinese woman in The Good Earth (and she only got the role because Paul Muni had been cast as Wang Lung, and the Hayes Office would have forbidden a Chinese actress to be cast as the wife of an American actor, even if he was playing Chinese – interracial marriage was still illegal in many states, even when it was fictional).
It didn’t seem to ruffle any feathers when an American actor played a character of another race in the early 1960s.
So in 1962, just before America lost its innocence, Shirley MacLaine starred in a movie produced by her then-husband entitled My Geisha. MacLaine plays popular movie star Lucy Dell. Her husband Paul Robaix (Yves Montand) is a director who seems to only have a career because he makes movies that star his wife. He wants to shoot a new version of the classic opera Madame Butterfly, but he refuses to cast Lucy as he wants the film to be as authentic as possible, including shooting on location. The studio balks, without his knowledge, and tells producer Sam Lewis (Edward G. Robinson) that they’ll give him half a million dollars which means shooting in black and white and not hiring professional singers to dub the voices. Lucy knows this will be a blow to her husband’s ego, so she does what any good wife in her position would do – she disguises herself as a geisha when visiting him in Japan and gets herself cast in the starring role. It’s a classic I Love Lucy plotline stretched out over two hours.
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Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures