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Friday, March 29, 2019

THREE STRIPES IN THE SUN (1955)

A couple of years before SAYONARA came out* (a big ticket item on love affairs between American servicemen and the Japanese during post-WWII occupation), this modest fact-based programmer from Columbia Pictures tested the waters on the same subject. Aldo Ray is the ‘Jap’ hating war vet, re-stationed in Japan, unable to move past his war mentality. But a young female Japanese interpreter and a visit to a war orphanage soften him up pretty quick, and soon he’s scavenging supplies from the base to help feed & house these undernourished war kids while falling hard for the pretty interpreter. Not a bad set-up for sentiment, comedy & a few lessons in common humanity. If only A-list writer Richard Murphy, in the first of only two directing gigs, got more out of his cast or the material. Dull, dull, dull; lots of opportunities, all missed. So Aldo Ray lumbers toward enlightenment; Dick York gnaws on 'best-bud' comedy shtick; Philip Carey gets stuck playing tough, but wise senior officer; and a pleasing Mitsuko Kimura ends a brief career as the spunky object of affection; all of them pretty much working on their own. Best thing in here is Burnett Guffey’s honestly drab on-location lensing of everyday places Hollywood rarely bothered to show, not a famous landmark or poetic sight in view. Plain, dusty, almost barren. Alas, so's the film.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Touchy, but warming post-war relations between Asians and Americans were in the air at the time. Right between this film and Marlon Brando starring in SAYONARA/’57, he tortured himself down to ‘feather-weight’ shape and put on YellowFace makeup for the once admired, but perfectly ghastly TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON/’56. (see below)

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