Miyoshi Umeki was part of the shin Issei, or a post-1945 immigrant from Japan, and a major talent that was hampered by limited ideas of where those gifts could be placed. She seemed entombed in a beatific, graceful doll-like mold. She played the stereotype with consummate skill, yet never quite achieved the enviable trick of subverting or dismantling it in large part. There are a few moments here and there where she truly shines, but too often she's left with the caricature and nothing more.
Umeki was born on May 8, 1929, the youngest of nine children to an industrialist father. She spent much of her time growing up escaping into music. Her first career was as a lounge singer with the GIs in the post-war occupation of Japan. Her singing voice is positively gorgeous and reflected in her earliest film appearances.
Her first film appearance was a brief one in 1953's Seishun Jazu Musume. Umeki appears singing before a large crowd and credited as Nancy Umeki. Not only is she credited as Nancy, but this offers one of the few instances where Umeki is costumed in something other than a kimono. She tenderly sings "Sayonara (Let's Say Goodbye)," a huge load of irony in a brief two minutes, while dressed in a beaded dress that wouldn't look out of place on June Allyson or Doris Day in one of their musicals from the era. It's a small glimpse at what treating her as a "normal" actress instead of an "ethnic" type would have looked like.
This is a stark contrast only in the aftermath of her eventual stardom. She made guest appearances on numerous musical variety shows between 1955 and 1972. Frequently she appeared in segments that contained the faintest hint of racism in the ways they kept her dressed in traditional Japanese garb, had her sing in a foreign language, or sit next to the All-American host(ess) and engage in something inevitably dubbed "Far Away Places" or "Buttons and Bows." Now that I think about it, these segments more often than not made her do a combination of all three.
Seishun Jazu Musume gives us a brief glimpse of what Umeki's jazz club career may have looked and sounded like. She soon set her sights and ambitions upon making it big in America, and found a reoccurring spot on Arthur Godfrey and His Friends in 1955. These guest spots brought her enough attention to make Hollywood's movie studios come sniffing around. In 1957, she made her major studio debut in Sayonara, starring Marlon Brando, James Garner, and Red Buttons.
Sayonara feels like the type of movie that was built on the assembly line to get maximum amount of Oscar nominations. It's just full of enough liberal politics to make people feel good about themselves watching it when it's really just a mildly ridiculous, soapy melodrama. Granted, there's some balls here since the film does offer up even the mildest of critiques of America's involvement in the Korea during the Cold War. There's also capitulations towards racism, miscegenation, and heaps of travelogue narrations and images.
It really does feel like the film has its heart in the right place, but it leans heavily into gross stereotypes about Japanese culture and submissive geisha doll wife. It is here that Umeki's big screen presence begins to take on uncomfortable textures and colors. A majority of her screen time here is merely as a background player, the ever smiling and breathy subservient housewife. It's hard to knock Umeki's performance as she's frequently quite good in the role, but it asks so little of her and her Oscar win is something of a mystery on its own merits. But if you think her work as a two-for-one special with Red Buttons, the clarity of her win becomes clearer.
Sayonara's two love stories fall into two distinct camps: authentic and fraught versus movie stars posing and staring at each other glamorously. Marlon Brando and Miiko Taka are the stiff but beautiful models here, with Brando's all-purpose southern accent calling attention to itself and the performance in a way that heightens the artifice on display. Their happy ending probably wrung many a crocodile tear from the audience but it plays like a cop out. Brando gets to thumb his nose at conventionality while Taka sacrifices everything to run off with him. Frankly, their entire plot left me with the vague sense of unease that the ending of The Graduate achieves.
Where Sayonara is best is when it focuses on Buttons and Umeki's doomed couple. They play their parts with deep rooted commitment. There's one scene where Umeki is finally allowed to transition from mere background player into heavy-duty acting, and she nails it. It's an argument with Buttons where it's revealed she's contemplated getting plastic surgery on her eyes to pass for white, hoping this surgery will allow them to circumvent the harsh laws preventing Americans from bringing home their Japanese brides. This scene and the strength and believably they manage to create as a couple on-screen probably snagged her the statue. Buttons' win is clear once you watch it, and since a majority of his time on screen is with Umeki it's not hard to believe that he helped pull her through to the finish line.With her Oscar, Umeki became the first Asian actor to win, and she remains the lone Asian actress to ever be awarded the statue. You'd think pulling off such a feat would provide some opportunities for her, but her next film didn't come out until 1961. There was an excursion to Broadway for the original production of Flower Drum Song, more on that one later, and a Tony nomination for her performance. (Watch the original cast on The Ed Sullivan Show.) Then came more television guest spots, including Bing Crosby's White Christmas All-Star Show and What's My Line?.
One of the best of these guest spots is on the series finale of The Gisele MacKenzie Show. Filmed shortly after winning her Oscar, Umeki uses our expectations of her as a bashful, demure presence to deliver moments of sly, winking humor. Most notably a tongue-in-cheek response to knowing that she wasn't going to win once Red Buttons did, because "I do not think they give two Oscar in same family." She goes on to perform a powerhouse rendition of "How Deep is the Ocean?" She mixes Japanese and English and builds the song to a stunning crescendo, and it is here that we get to embrace the full maximum impact of Umeki's talents, many of which were squandered in her limited filmography. (Watch it here.)
She would eventually return to the big screen in a pair of films released in 1961. First up, the cringe-worthy Cry for Happy, about four American GIs who crash a Tokyo geisha home and through a series of improbable events, wind up turning it into an orphanage. Nobody appears to be having fun here, with Glenn Ford looking bored and Donald O'Connor adrift without pulling faces or breaking out into a song-and-dance number.
Once more, casual racism turns its Japanese actresses into smiling, placid figures. Miiko Taka returns, and she's once again sacked with a nothing role. Miyoshi Umeki fares no better despite her critical success and awards. They play two of the four geishas, none of whom get much in the way of development. We know from the start that some of them will inevitably pair off with the American GIs into filmic happily ever afters, but that doesn't stop us from having to watch the GIs think that they're basically prostitutes and trying to treat them as such. "Comedic" misunderstandings ensue, some romance blossoms, and then all chaos unleashes as the various lies come to a heady conclusion.
Opportunities were rare for Asian actors, so I can't entirely be upset with the choice they made to star in this. At least there's no yellow-face unlike with Ricardo Montalban in Sayonara (Rita Moreno referred to them both as being "house ethnics" during their MGM/studio contract days). But that's how low the bar is set for this predictable, low-brow film that goes on way too long. Umeki's talents deserved a better showcase, and she'd get one in her next film, even with the mountains of problems attached to it.
I promised that we'd discuss Flower Drum Song later, well, that time is now. Reprising her Tony nominated role, Umeki is clearly given her finest hour in the movies with Flower Drum Song. But there's a major caveat with attached to that as Flower Drum Song is loaded with stereotypes, the weakest of the Rodgers and Hammerstein books/scores, and over-stuffed with incident that leaves its main players as mere sketches and supporting ideas instead of fleshed-out characters. And that is not even factoring in the queasiness of watching Juanita Hall, a black woman, play a Chinese woman and sing "Chop Suey," probably the lowest of this film's numerous lows.
The film is both about a generational conflict, the Old East versus the New West, and a series of young romantics falling in and out of love with each other. There's just too much going on in the story and it feels burdened with both too much and too little. Yet there's still the chance to watch a series of Asian actors take the lead, play romantic partners, sing and dance.
Nancy Kwan is saucy and vivacious as naughty girl Linda Low, Jack Soo plays Sammy Fong like he stepped out of a Damon Runyon story, and James Shigeta is wonderful as the charming and handsome leading man. The best performance is clearly Umeki as Mei Li, the immigrant who came into the country illegally to enter into an arranged marriage. She's still demure and bashful here, but she gets to crack jokes ("Don't Marry Me" with Soo is a riot), sing ("A Hundred Million Miracles" is delightful under her hand), and assert some brains and agency by finding the loophole in her arranged marriage to run off with the man she really loves. She's also just routinely charming and endearing throughout, displaying that mischievous sense of humor from The Gisele MacKenzie Show and knocking you out with her musical abilities.Umeki gets the closest thing to a full-bodied character here, but despite being nominated as lead actress by the Golden Globes, she's still merely one player in a ever-expanding roster of characters and production numbers that place the emphasis in strange spots. Kwan's "I Enjoy Being a Girl," one of the best and campiest songs in the entire thing, understandably gets the full lavish treatment, but the dance breakdown in "The Other Generation" just eats up time as the kids are hardly major players in the story. Same goes for "Love, Look Away," undoubtedly one of the best moments in the film for its beautiful dancing and production design, but it's given to a character that has barely registered as a player in any of these events until this exact moment.
Even worse is the icky political undercurrent where Kwan and Umeki are basically pitied against each other in a variation of the whore/virgin complex. Flower Drum Song wants us to believe that the old ways are the best ways, and that includes the docile, quiet wife. It's all wrapped up in glossy colors, extensive production design, and a general sense of happy, warm fantasy. In this way, Flower Drum Song has a lot in common with the pair of all-black musicals from 1943, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather: they're rare glimpses to watch a majority of people color get to play characters and display the full-range of their talents, even if the material is crudely stereotypical.
It remains the lone film of Umeki's limited filmography to enter the National Film Registry having been selected in 2008, which makes sense since it's more intriguing as a cultural artifact than an actual film. It was the lone Rodgers and Hammerstein film to lose money, and one of the few made outside of 20th Century Fox (this was one is from Universal). It's not a terrible film, it is entertaining if unwieldy, it's just loaded with baggage that hinders one's maximum enjoyment.
Her penultimate film would prove be the nadir of her brief film career. Absolutely nothing about The Horizontal Lieutenant works. It's one of those early 60s sex farces where the title does most of the good joke work for it. The rest is a lazy affair of poor plotting, indifferently written characters, and basic jokes that fail to engage. Umeki is wasted in a role that isn't even enough to call nothing. Her appearance boils down to yelling at American GIs in Japanese then performing a bilingual musical number. It's a waste of several prominent and lesser-known talents.
Her final screen appearance is in A Girl Named Tamiko, a film with that plays like mediocre leftovers of Sayonara. Instead of Miiko Taka and Marlon Brando you've got France Nuyen and Laurence Harvey as the interracial couple. Harvey's dour screen presence terminates any heat in the central love triangle, and he's out-gunned by his two leading ladies, the other being Martha Hyer doing her best in glamorous movie star poses. The whole thing is frankly interminable at nearly two hours, and it ends up just limping along on the strength of on-location footage that's artlessly spliced into the film.
Umeki plays Harvey's best friend, and she's achingly vulnerable and desperate to make a connection with him. She doesn't get much screen time, but she does well with what little she's given. It's a step-up from The Horizontal Lieutenant, but it's still a limited part that's unworthy of an actress with an Oscar and a Tony nomination under her belt.After this, Umeki would return to guest spots on television and eventually in 1969 would sign on for The Courtship of Eddie's Father. She's warm and maternal, caring and diplomatic in the role of Mrs. Livingston, the housekeeper and something of Eddie's surrogate familial matriarch. She garnered her third Golden Globe nomination for the role. The Courtship of Eddie's Father would end up being her final acting work.
For a period of time she and her second husband, Randall Hood, operated a business renting out editing equipment for university film programs and professional productions. Then she moved off to Missouri at some point after her husband's death to be near her son and his family. She wasn't heard from again until her death in 2007 at the age of 78.
It was around this time that I first encountered her work. Flower Drum Song was played on TCM and I found her utterly enchanting and charismatic. I stand by that initial impression even if her completed body of work is a textbook case of stellar talent given the shaft by prevalent attitudes and limited opportunities for minority talent.
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