Saturdays with the Stars Season 2 Finale

Two of our legendary Stars of 2020,
Sophia Loren & Jayne Mansfield

Yesterday with The Three Musketeers we hit the finale of our second season of "Saturdays with the Stars," and before we start the new year (and a new season, devoted to Hitchcock's leading ladies), I wanted to take time to celebrate another season, and one I treat as a success.  We never missed a Saturday (there was one close call, but that was really it-being stuck at home made at least this part of 2020 easier), and I saw a lot of new movies & now have a better understanding of twelve stars, some of which I knew next to nothing about before this year.  And I hope you learned something as well!

It's always fascinating to me to focus on an actor's career, rather than as we typically do in film discussions on a director's.  Watching these women, particularly under the guise of "Sex Symbols" was intriguing to me because Hollywood had different attitudes toward these beautiful women as the public began to find their sexuality passé, or eventually, absent.  It is kind of heartbreaking to watch someone like a Jayne Mansfield or Raquel Welch, who clearly chose poorly at select moments of their careers & paid the price for it, and fascinating to watch a figure like Sophia Loren or Ann-Margret who was able to rise above their studio-forced persona and eventually gain mainstream critical recognition in their lifetimes.

Every film I watched this year was a movie I was seeing for the very first time, as well, so once again I was blown away by the expanses of Classic Hollywood, rich with westerns and noir and musicals that I'd never been exposed to.  Next year we'll do our third and final tour of Classic Hollywood actresses (after that, if we continue the series, we're going to either add men or a more modern element for a fourth season), so we'll continue to mine this well, but before we do that, let's hand out some superlatives for this year's leading ladies.

Favorite Performance from Each Star

January: Jean Harlow-Red Dust

February: Betty Grable-I Wake Up Screaming

March: Lena Horne-Cabin in the Sky

April: Rita Hayworth-Separate Tables

May: Lana Turner-The Postman Always Rings Twice

June: Marilyn Monroe-The Misfits

July: Jayne Mansfield-Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

August: Sophia Loren-Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

September: Gina Lollobrigida-Come September

October: Nancy Kwan-The World of Suzie Wong

November: Ann-Margret-Carnal Knowledge

December: Raquel Welch-The Three Musketeers

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical)

Jean Harlow

Rita Hayworth

Sophia Loren

Marilyn Monroe

Lana Turner

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Rita Hayworth, Separate Tables

Sophia Loren, Two Women

Sophia Loren, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits

Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Cabin in the Sky

Cover Girl

I Wake Up Screaming

Imitation of Life

Libeled Lady

The Misfits

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Red Dust

Separate Tables

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Clark Gable, The Misfits

David Niven, Separate Tables

Eli Wallach, The Misfits

Ethel Waters, Cabin in the Sky

Eve Arden, Cover Girl

Jennifer Jones, Beat the Devil

Juanita Moore, Imitation of Life

Laird Cregar, I Wake Up Screaming

Susan Kohner, Imitation of Life

Thelma Ritter, The Misfits

The Wrecking Crew (1969)

Film: The Wrecking Crew (1969)
Stars: Dean Martin, Elke Sommer, Sharon Tate, Nancy Kwan, Nigel Green, Tina Louise
Director: Phil Karlson
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the end of the 1960's, what promise had been contained for Nancy Kwan's stardom had largely gone.  We were nearly a decade away from the seismic success of The World of Suzie Wong, and Hollywood didn't have a lot of imagination with casting her, though they continued to cast her in B-grade movies with high billing for the remainder of the decade.  While we'll talk about what happened after for her below, we're going to thus end our look at Nancy Kwan with a film at the end of the decade, one that definitely has her in a prominent role (arguably more prominent than the last two films we've profiled for her), but is more famous for her costars, and how this movie was the start of one major career...and the tragic end of another.

(Spoilers Ahead) I'll be real-I've never seen any of the Matt Helm films.  During the post-Dr. No years of the 1960's, Hollywood was crawling with James Bond knockoffs in hopes of capturing some of the crazy success of that franchise.  Movies like Casino Royale and film series like the Derek Flint movies (with James Coburn) became regular fare from studios, and one of these parodies were four films starring Dean Martin as spy Matt Helm.  The movies are meant to be parodies of the Bond franchise, played for comic effect, with lots of gadgets & beautiful women.  I haven't seen the others, but it's pretty easy to see continuity isn't going to be an issue here as the plot is anecdotal to the movie. We have Matt trying to rescue $1 billion in gold from the villainous Count Contini (Green), while also avoiding his clumsy partner Freya Carlson (Tate), who continually bumbles into more problems for Matt to solve while also trying to recover the gold.  Contini has a number of beautiful women as his associates (Sommer, Kwan, Louise), all of whom alternate between being turned on by Matt & trying to kill him (all three end up dead for their troubles).  The movie ends with Matt & Friya attempting to make love, but Friya accidentally pulling the emergency brake on the train they're on, with the two of them hurtling toward the screen in a flash frame, and them advertising the next movie (which would never be made).

There was a reason that film was never made, and it had to do not with Kwan, but with one of her costars.  Based on the cast list & the year this was released, you might have put together that this was the last film Sharon Tate starred in that was released during her lifetime.  The film was released in New York in February of 1969, and she was murdered six months later in Hollywood's most notorious homicide, by the Manson Family.  Supposedly Martin was so despondent over her death that he couldn't make the fifth film, and it was scrapped by Columbia.

This is, therefore, the movie that Margot Robbie watches fifty years after it was released in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, her feet up on the seat and gleefully enjoying the actual Sharon Tate onscreen.  The movie itself isn't particularly good, but it's kind of fun.  If you get past the sexism (and oh is there sexism, even by spy film standards), it's cheesy & goofy & Tate's funny in the movie, as are Kwan and Louise playing one-note characters well (I didn't think Sommer's part was as well-drawn as the other three).  It's not a good movie, so it's getting two-stars, but it's not a bad way to kill two hours if you get into spy films.

While the film marked the end of Sharon Tate's career, it weirdly started another film icon's work in Hollywood pictures.  Bruce Lee at this point had starred in his role as Kato in The Green Hornet TV series, but had not worked on a Hollywood movie set until The Wrecking Crew where he was the action choreographer (one of the men whom he choreographed was Chuck Norris, making his screen debut in a small part).  This sparked a friendship between Lee and Kwan, one of the actors he worked with on fight scenes, that would last the remainder of Lee's life; two year's later Lee would become an international superstar with The Big Boss, and four years after The Wrecking Crew Lee would also, like Tate, die tragically young, a Hollywood death that conspiracy theorists still debate.

Nancy Kwan's film career continued sporadically, but never with as consistent of roles as she had during the 1960's.  Like many actresses of her generation, she'd spend the 1980's doing television, including spots on a nighttime soap opera (Knots Landing), and later in the 2000's would appear in a guest spot on ER.  She endured tragedy in the 1990's when her only child, Bernard, died of AIDS, and she turned down what might have been a comeback role in The Joy Luck Club due to problems with the script (namely a line in the film that disparaged The World of Suzie Wong).  Overall, Kwan achieved a success no Asian woman had ever had in Hollywood in the 1960's, and one that only now with Awkafina & Constance Wu are we seeing any Asian women attempt to hit again...but it's hard not to notice that other actresses who were breaking out in 1960 like Natalie Wood or Angie Dickinson got bigger careers than Kwan.  Next month, we're going to continue to look at an actress of the 1960's, one who made her debut near Nancy Kwan's but whose career was afforded a more traditional path to stardom in Hollywood...even though she insisted on taking a lot of detours along the way.

Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN (1966)

Film: Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN (1966)
Stars: Dick van Dyke, Nancy Kwan, Akim Tamiroff
Director: Byron Paul
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we mentioned last week, Nancy Kwan's career never really hit the heights of The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song again.  That should not, however, be confused with the idea that Kwan never made another big hit...because she did.  In 1966, Walt Disney was essentially about to die (he'd die before the end of the year), but he was making a lot of money not on his animated films, but instead on theme parks and live-action films, frequently that blended in some sort of animation, the most famous being Mary Poppins.  Disney actually if you look at his credits made far more live-action films in his lifetime than fully-animated films (though if you add in the shorts, those numbers quickly revert).  One of the films he created at the end of his life was a modern-day comic retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story starring Dick van Dyke, and you guessed it, Nancy Kwan.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is odd at first.  It starts initially with van Dyke's Robin Crusoe writing a letter to his longtime love Jane, and trying to explain why he missed their wedding.  We then flashback to Robin flying and getting in a plane accident over the middle of the ocean, where the narrator shifts briefly to a manual, which sarcastically mocks the scenarios that van Dyke is getting into, namely a shark trying to eat him while he's on a raft no bigger than a couch cushion.  When he washes ashore, the narration stops (he buries the manual in the sand), and we see him interact with a monkey named Floyd (supposedly one of the chimps sent into space by the NASA program), and then by an island woman named Wednesday (Kwan), who speaks English for, well, the script doesn't really explain that one but it feels like it's there for convenience.  Soon a whole group of island girls are coming to be with Robin (who remains faithful to Jane, though not without temptation), and demand equal rights in whom they marry from Wednesday's father, the chief (Tamiroff).  The film ends with Robin pretending to be an island deity to get rights for the women, only to have Wednesday start hunting him down because he won't marry her, as he's loyal to Jane...after which he's rescued just-in-time.

The movie is, and I cannot stress this enough, stupid.  Dick van Dyke would've been one of the biggest stars in America in 1966 not only due to Mary Poppins but also because of his eponymous television series, but his schtick doesn't really hold for modern audiences.  There's a kind of fun with the sarcastic narration of the manual, and I wish the film had stuck to that motif as it was its most charming asset, but absent that, it's really overlong, charmless, and awfully racist toward the end (not only in the provincial way that Wednesday & the island girls are treated, but also in the casting of the white Tamiroff as the brown-skinned island chief...this may also explain why this film is not on Disney+).

That said, Robin Crusoe was a big hit in 1966, making it onto the list of the year's highest-grossing films and affording Kwan an extension on her stardom.  She's not in a lot of the film, and though she's the best part, that's not saying much.  She is asked to be beautiful and vivacious, which she is, but we aren't given any challenge like she got with Suzie Wong and the movie doesn't have fun with her character like we saw in Flower Drum Song.  As a result, this is a crucial (given the box office) chapter in looking at Kwan's stardom, but it's pretty dispiriting that she had to take these kinds of parts so soon after she'd been getting more authentic roles.  Next week we're going to end our month-long look at Nancy Kwan with a movie that created a lasting friendship between Kwan and another screen legend...a film that got an unexpected chapter in its pop culture shelf life when it become a plot point in a blockbuster Best Picture nominee decades later.

OVP: Fate is the Hunter (1964)

Film: Fate is the Hunter (1964)
Stars: Glenn Ford, Nancy Kwan, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Jane Russell
Director: Ralph Nelson
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Most discussion of Nancy Kwan's career begin with The World of Suzie Wong and end with Flower Drum Song.  Despite only being 22 when Flower Drum Song was released, and thus really at the beginning of a potentially promising career, Kwan would never have another role that would match these two, either in terms of confidence from the studios in giving her a big part in a movie, or in terms of simple pop culture importance-those were two prominent films, ones that were lauded for awards and major backing from the studios.  But in 1961, despite the fact that the Hays Code no longer had a miscegenation rule (it was removed in 1956), and the fact that Sayonara, South Pacific, and Suzie Wong had proven there was money in showing interracial relationships and hiring Asian actors in prominent roles in movies, Kwan, like her Flower Drum Song costar James Shigeta, was not afforded the kind of high-profile roles we'd normally expect for attractive young stars who had been featured in hot studio properties.  However, we have three more Saturdays, and Kwan continued to make movies where she received prominent billing, for today and the following two weeks we're going to look at three of her other films, all of which were released by major studios.  Today we will start that peak into the forgotten films of her career with 20th Century Fox's Fate is the Hunter.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is unusual in that it kills off one of the above-the-line stars of the film within the first 15 minutes, but not in a Psycho way.  Rod Taylor plays Jack Savage, a cocky, good-hearted pilot who moments after takeoff has an engine go out on him while trying to land a plane.  The other engine soon goes out as well, and while it seems like he's successfully landed the plane on a beach, it hits a pier, and explodes, killing everyone onboard save for a flight attendant named Martha (Pleshette).  Glenn Ford's Sam McBane works for the airline and is an old friend of Jack's from the War (it's not entirely clear to me if we're talking World War II or Korea here-it's not the kind of movie that gets bogged down in such details).  He tries to clear Jack's good name, as the press are blaming him for killing 53 people.  Along the way, he meets Jack's ex-fiance (Dorothy Malone in an uncredited cameo), and Sally Fraser (Kwan), his new girlfriend, who ponders whether it was fate that caused the plane to crash.  Going with this line of thinking, Sam clears Jack's name by recreating the flight, and learning that a glitch in the plane caused the wiring to short circuit thanks to some spilled coffee.  Sally, Sam, and Martha all leave, knowing that they proved the innocence of their friend.

The movie is, and I cannot stress this enough, mind-numbingly boring.  For a movie that kills 50 people before the credits role, it cannot be stressed enough how dull and listless the film is.  I've talked about my mild allergy to Glenn Ford on this blog before, but he's usually saved by a charming actress as his costar (principally Rita Hayworth).  Here, though, his most prominent costar is Rod Taylor in flashbacks, and they don't have chemistry, and we keep seeing the same song from every person that Taylor interviews (save his ex-wife)-that Jack was the best man they ever met, and therefore he didn't cause the flight to crash.  No one really comments on the fact that the two aren't connected-honorable people make mistakes all the time, sometimes tragically, and someone being a "good guy" is not a logical reason why he couldn't accidentally crash a plane.

The best parts of the movie are the cameos from Malone & Jane Russell (she's credited as "Guest Star" but it's to be assumed she's playing Jane Russell)-Malone adds a texture to Jack that the script isn't willing to indulge, and Russell hams it up in a movie that could use some flavor.  Nancy Kwan doesn't show up until 55 minutes in; you get the impression that if Pleshette were a bigger name she'd have gotten Kwan's billing, as she has the bigger part.  Kwan plays an ichthyologist whose main role is to introduce the title scene of "fate" to Sam, but again-this doesn't make logical sense (there's very little else in the script that reads as fate rather than just "coincidence").  Her performance lacks the spark she had in our two previous entries, and while she's magnetic by comparison to Ford & Taylor, this isn't high praise as everyone else is just dragging in a bloated disaster film with little logic to its story.

OVP: Flower Drum Song (1961)

Film: Flower Drum Song (1961)
Stars: Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, Miyoshi Umeki, Benson Fong, Jack Soo, Juanita Hall, Reiko Sato
Director: Henry Koster
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Sound, Scoring)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Most actors in Nancy Kwan's position would have scrambled to know how to follow a film like The World of Suzie Wong.  A 21-year-old who made a massive hit that suddenly made her a household name would always struggle in such a situation, but Kwan had become a star in a Hollywood where Natalie Wood or Debbie Reynolds were the big names on marquees; there weren't a lot of roles for an Asian-American actress in Hollywood without Hollywood trying color blind casting, which even today they're not great at, and in 1961 was almost non-existent.  Luckily for Kwan, there was in fact a film that would be perfect for her that went into production shortly after Suzie Wong, the big-screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Flower Drum Song, the latest from Rodgers & Hammerstein.  Considering her quick celebrity at the time, Kwan was hired almost immediately after Suzie Wong was released in the part of Linda, thus for the time-being avoiding what we'd seen from actresses of color like Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge who couldn't get parts immediately after their breakouts, and instead being treated like most actors after they had a breakout hit-that is, get them in something else quickly to cash in on the new name.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a musical love square of sorts, and takes place in San Francisco.  The first player in the square is Mei Li (Umeki), a mild-mannered girl from Hong Kong who has stowed away & is coming to marry Sammy Fong (Soo), a rambunctious nightclub owner who is contracted to marry her despite them having little in common.  This is a problem because Sammy is in love with Linda (Kwan), a dancer in his club who is mad he hasn't proposed, and therefore starts pursuing Wang Ta (Shigeta), the son of a wealthy traditional father (Fong) who wants his son to marry someone like Mei Li...and eventually when it's clear that Sammy is trying to go back on the contract, he does just that, arranging for their wedding.  The film thus has about two hours of back-and-forth, including a weird interlude with a fifth wheel, Helen (Sato), that's never really resolved (side note-this is the biggest issue with the film's plot that we never understand what happens to her, and I figured out why when I realized that the book has Helen kill herself, which would've been too much of a bummer in a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical...but why not just cut her entirely?), with eventually Mei Li & Wang Ta together and Sammy & Linda getting married in a double wedding.

As you might expect, the film is a teensy bit dated, but not as much as you'd think.  The most egregious sin in the film would be that Juanita Hall as Madame Liang is in yellowface, though she's the only actor that is doing so (is it weird to anyone else that Hall's two most famous film roles have her playing an Asian-American actress, her other being Bloody Mary in South Pacific, despite her being African-American in real life?), but otherwise the film takes more care than you'd expect to not be derogatory about Asian-Americans, or to indulge in too many stereotypes.  Flower Drum Song was the first major American film to feature a predominantly Asian cast, and it was unfortunately not the harbinger of more (really only The Joy Luck Club in 1993 or Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 could boast a similar cache), so it was refreshing that I didn't have to cringe too much during this film because of dated portrayals

By far my favorite performance in the movie was Kwan's.  She gets the best role, even if Umeki is the more traditional heroine part (and despite "Suzie Wong" getting the lead, Umeki gets more substantial screen-time).  Her ballet roots show off in her dance numbers, she's fun & flirty in the part, giving the film (which drags at times from trying to underline to a predominantly white audience specific aspects of Asian-American culture) a sense of bounce & light.  She also gets the movie's best musical number, the only song from the film that you'd know (this is one of the few Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals with a little-known score): "I Enjoy Being a Girl."

The film was not the hit that Suzie Wong was.  You'll read some accounts of the film being a flop, which doesn't appear to be the case (it seems to have roughly broken even), but it certainly wasn't the gargantuan success that more recent Rodgers & Hammerstein big-screen adaptations The King & I and South Pacific had been.  Critics also were mixed on the film, particularly wondering why it was so decadent, but as far as Kwan's career it still felt like a smart move.  We'll get to what happened next in her stardom throughout October, but between Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song, her career looked in as good as shape as any Asian-American star had ever seen in 1961.

The film won five Academy Award nominations (losing all of them to West Side Story).  I do tend to agree with some of the critics when it came to the aesthetic choices in the film.  While some of the art direction is gorgeous (I love the sort of wavy, watery set during Helen's ballet sequence), there are other sequences that feel gaudy and out-of-place (what was hell with the beat poetry scene that lasts for five seconds?).  Occasionally the art direction has a sense that the budget was too large, the same with the costumes.  The best look might have been Kwan's mini-towel dress during "I Enjoy Being a Girl" since it's such a fresh look, but during other sequences (like her fan dance number), it borders into tacky.  The musical numbers are in a similar situation-"I Enjoy Being a Girl" and "Chop Suey" are both super fun, but some of the others are routine, and in the case of the ones featuring Umeki, dull (the same goes for the sound work, which varies wildly throughout the film along with the musical numbers).  Cinematography makes sense considering all of the color on display, but again the indulgence of the film overwhelms some scenes (though, again, the Helen Ballet sequence may be superfluous to the plot, but it's brilliantly-rendered).

The World of Suzie Wong (1960)

Film: The World of Suzie Wong (1960)
Stars: William Holden, Nancy Kwan, Sylvia Syms, Michael Wilding
Director: Richard Quine
Oscar History: No nominations, though Kwan won the Best Newcomer Golden Globe and was nominated for Actress in a Drama, which generally would indicate she was close to getting a nomination.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Nancy Kwan's stardom almost certainly wouldn't have happened were it not for Marlon Brando's wandering eye.  Kwan had been understudying the role of Suzie Wong in the national touring production of the play, which starred actress France Nuyen in the lead role.  Nuyen was more famous than Kwan due to her role in the blockbuster South Pacific, and as a result was the frontrunner for the film part opposite William Holden, even though some (including star William Holden) had preferred Kwan's audition, and so Nuyen was hired to the lead (with Kwan getting the consolation of the part on Broadway).  However, Nuyen's troubled relationship with Marlon Brando, whom she suspected was cheating on her (and knowing Brando, he probably was), caused her to gain weight on the set & not to be able to handle playing the part.  She was fired, and Paramount hired Kwan as the female lead (weirdly, two years after Suzie Wong, Nuyen would costar with Holden in Satan Never Sleeps, so there wasn't too much ill-will from this situation with either party).  And thus, Kwan had something very rare for an Asian-American actress in 1960's Hollywood-the opportunity to play the lead in a major studio motion picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around Robert Lomax (Holden), a struggling artist living in late-1950's Hong Kong.  In the opening scene he meets a girl named Mei Ling (Kwan) on a boat who seems to be the over-privileged daughter of a wealthy Chinese figure, who accuses him of stealing her purse.  When Lomax accidentally books a hotel in a red light, he realizes the girl is not the daughter of a wealthy man, but a verbose prostitute who goes by Suzie Wong.  The film chronicles his complicated relationship with Suzie, who is secretive (she will learn about you, but doesn't want you to know too much about her), and of course their relationship breaks both racial & class norms considering she is a Hong Kong prostitute and he's a painter with connections to wealth (but he himself doesn't have money).  The film has some dark turns in its second act (we learn that Suzie's got a secret son and that Sylvia Sims' Kay, Suzie's rival for Robert's affections, is not the open-minded progressive she seems to be when it comes to fighting for his heart), but overall it's a pretty light movie up until the last thirty minutes, a romantic drama with some comic elements.

The film is really hard to review for someone modern-day.  The movie is interesting in the sense that Suzie is a fully-fleshed character-this is very much her story, not Robert's, and she's not a side distraction as he figures out his next move.  But this is also a movie that deals with a lot of stereotypes about Asian women (exoticizing them, making all of the named female Asian characters play prostitutes, and she does play a subservient role to Robert).  Robert is occasionally violent with Suzie, and Suzie seems to encourage this as a sign of affection, something we wouldn't allow in a modern film, and it's by-far the most uncomfortable aspect of the movie.  But it was also a step forward for Hollywood to have any Asian actress getting such a significant role.  While actors like France Nuyen & Miyoshi Umeki were getting important roles in movies, they weren't leads, and really Kwan was the first actress since Silent Film Star Anna May Wong to be afforded an opportunity like Suzie Wong.  Along with James Shigeta (her future costar) getting to play a lead role in Columbia's The Crimson Kimono the year before, in 1960 we were seeing a brief moment where Hollywood was willing to give Asian actors the kind of stardom that had eluded them since the Silent Era.

And Nancy Kwan took that opportunity & made it her own.  She's the best part of the film, and while the character is problematic & occasionally you can see that this is her first movie (certain line readings feel a bit rehearsed), you can't deny she's an intoxicating film presence.  She makes Suzie her own & runs with it, completely crafting a character that feels three-dimensional as the movie wears on.  While the film itself gets too heavy-handed (though the bay shots in Hong Kong are gorgeous, and kind of jaw-dropping to see such well-lit location shoots in the 1950's), especially in the back-half, it's the sort of role that would've normally gotten her Oscar talk, and given her Globe nomination, one has to wonder if she was somewhat close to being the first openly-Asian actress to ever be nominated for an Oscar (Merle Oberon was not open about her ethnicity, and is to-date the only Asian actress to be cited for Best Actress).  The box office wouldn't have hurt her AMPAS case-Suzie Wong was a smash hit, becoming Paramount's second-biggest hit of the year after Psycho, and gave the studio an overnight sensation star that didn't fit their typical mold.  Unlike Lena Horne earlier this year, though, Kwan would be able to follow up Suzie Wong with a groundbreaking musical...which we will take a look at next week.

Saturdays with the Stars: Nancy Kwan

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the movies of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Gina Lollobrigida, an actress who gained international fame & acclaim early in her career, but became more famous for a decades-long feud & her bust size.  This month, we'll move halfway across the planet to Hong Kong, to discuss an actress who was amongst Lollobrigida's peers, but unlike Gina, eventually made a career in pictures filmed in America.  This month, our star is Nancy Kwan.

Born in Hong Kong, Kwan's early life was complicated.  Her father was a Cantonese architect while her mother was English (and white); at the time in China, interracial marriages were still considered quite taboo.  During World War II, Nancy, her father, and her two brothers fled to Western China during the invasion of the country by Japan, with her mother returning to England and not really playing a role in the rest of her life.  Returning to Hong Kong after the war, Kwan lived a posh lifestyle that involved ballet lessons, and eventually, training by the Royal Ballet School in London.  It was there she met Ray Stark, a stage producer who would change her life.

Kwan wasn't the original choice to play the part of Suzie Wong (in the big-screen adaptation of The World of Suzie Wong), but fate (and bad decisions) helped her get the part.  France Nuyen, who had played the role on stage and was already well-known to American audiences for her role in South Pacific, was the favorite of the studio, but she dropped out.  Rumors persist as to why (with the most salacious being that she was pregnant with Marlon Brando's love child, as she was in a relationship with the actor at the time), but either way, Nuyen was out and Kwan was in, and that's what it took.  Suzie Wong became a gargantuan hit for Paramount, and as a result, Kwan became the first Asian actress since Anna May Wong 25 years earlier to become a bankable leading woman.

Kwan's time in the spotlight was brief, and we're going to try and explore as much of her career as possible this month.  Suzie Wong brought acclaim (she won a Golden Globe for the film, and I suspect was very close to an Oscar nomination for it), a Life Magazine cover, and a high-profile follow-up (the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song), but her career never really equalled the promise of her first two movies.  That said, she headlined films throughout the 1960's, and was really the first Asian-American sex symbol in Hollywood.  This month we'll take a look at her unusual and trailblazing career, including her breakout role in Suzie Wong, and find out why Kwan was able to be a first in so many ways within Tinseltown.