The movie The King and I was — blessedly — color-restored, the rich pinks, blues and greens of John DeCuir’s art direction brought back to what they were originally instead of the murky mix of greens and browns they were in the prints that have previously circulated lo these many years. It also ran at its full running time of 133 minutes, even though it felt cut — three songs (“My Lord and Master,” “Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?” and “I Have Dreamed”) that are on the soundtrack album don’t exist in the film. Still, it’s an amazing movie, holding up quite well if you can handle the relentless stylization (the sets of “Siam” look about as much like the real Thailand, then or now, as the sets of Top Hat actually looked like the real Venice). Yul Brynner turned in one of those performances that wins the Academy Award simply because the scenery-chewing is so obvious (it would be utterly absurd to take this seriously as a realistic portrayal of absolute power, but within the confines of this flamboyantly unrealistic conception, Brynner’s acting works; the problem was it was virtually impossible for him, once he got “typed” as the King of Siam, to soften his technique to play anything else!), and Deborah Kerr’s acting as Anna is effective — though it would have been much more effective if she, like Gertrude Lawrence or Julie Andrews, had actually been able to sing; as it is, like Audrey Hepburn’s collaboration with Marni Nixon in My Fair Lady, this is only half a performance, the voice double trying to suppress any of her own originality to “match” the on-screen actress, who because she isn’t doing her own singing can’t bring any unique, personal touches to the songs the way Lawrence and Andrews could. Still, The King and I holds up as a marvelous movie, efficiently directed by Walter Lang (about all he really had to do is make sure the giant CinemaScope 55 cameras were pointed in the right direction), ravishingly photographed by Leon Shamroy (with just a hint here and there of his obsession with color filters, with which he would proceed to ruin the film of South Pacific) and vividly designed by DeCuir. — 8/15/93
•••••
Yesterday afternoon I spent most of the day “out,” hitting
Horton Plaza to cash a check and buy a pair of jeans at the Original Levi’s
Store (I’ve, uh, expanded so much over
the years that there was only one
style of pants in the entire store that came in my size!), then hot-footed it
up to Hillcrest and got some more blank tapes to do a few more copies of my
Beatles cover tape (these as a good-will present for my out-of-town
distributors and for a few additional friends, including Moksha Todd, Jim Villa
and Bob Evans) and returned in time to see Peter Ray and watch the 1956 film of
The King and I with him. Watching
this movie with Peter was like someone else watching a movie about politics or
jazz with me; Peter pointed out all the technical errors (ranging from the
Japanese-style garden in the palace of the King of Siam to the rickshaws —
never used in Thailand — and Yul Brynner’s gesticulations while he was
supposedly praying to the Buddha, which is actually done with arms outstretched
and flat on the ground; Brynner began and ended his prayer in the right
position but got up and “acted” in between) as well as giving them points for
authenticity (apparently the palace in the movie is an exact replica of the
real one, which still exists in Bangkok). Peter pointed out that the metal
hats, worn in the film by the King’s children of both genders, are actually
worn only by women (so the Crown Prince wouldn’t have had one); and he also
pointed out that the actor who played the Crown Prince looked Nepalese instead
of Thai. He noted that one of the costumes was exact except that it was missing an extra fold of cloth down the
back, and naturally he noticed that while Rita Moreno’s attempt at a Thai
accent was credible, it was readily distinguishable from the real thing.
(Carlos Rivas, who played Moreno’s illicit lover, was also Latino but, unlike
Moreno, he didn’t even try for an
Asian accent; when he sang the line “We hide from the moon,” the “h” in the
word “hide” was the rasping “ch” sound Spanish speakers usually make with that
letter when it begins a word.) — 12/30/97
•••••
Last night’s “feature” was The King and I, 20th Century-Fox’s 1956 filmization of
the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical based on the more or less true
story of Anna Leonowens, a British widow who was hired to be tutor to the
67-plus children of King Mongkut of Siam (the country now called Thailand).
Though Leonowens apparently wrote her own memoir — which might be worth
reading: it’s the sort of movie that makes one wonder how accurate it is and
whether the real story might have made better drama — the original source for
this was a book called Anna and the King of Siam, which 20th Century-Fox had produced a
non-musical film of in 1946 starring Irene Dunne as Anna and Rex Harrison as
the King. (I’ve never seen that film complete but I’ve seen a few clips from
it, and what I remember is the preposterous amount of eyeliner they gave Rex
Harrison in an attempt to make him look Asian.) In 1951 Oscar Hammerstein II
wrote the book and lyrics for a musical version that was intended both as a
follow-up to their string of smash Broadway hits Oklahoma!, Carousel and South Pacific and a vehicle for the great Gertrude Lawrence, who
was cast as Anna opposite a then little-known Russian-born actor named Yul
Brynner as the King.
Alas, Lawrence was already ill with cancer when she took
the role and she died in the middle of the original Broadway run (though,
fortunately, her beautifully phrased singing of Anna’s songs is preserved on an
original-cast album), so when producer Charles Brackett (Billy Wilder’s former
writing and producing partner) put together the film he had the task of finding
a different Anna. He carried over Brynner from the stage cast (making him one
of the few actors, along with Barbra Streisand, who won a Tony and an Oscar for
playing the same role) and decided to cast Deborah Kerr as Anna. The only
problem was that Kerr couldn’t sing, so Brackett went with Marni Nixon as her
voice double even though, according to imdb.com, Nixon’s voice was a high
soprano and Richard Rodgers had written the songs for a lower voice — so they
ran Nixon’s voice through some early examples of electronic filtering and got
it to sound richer and deeper. Though one (or at least someone like me)
treasures the irony that Fox cast the non-musical version of this story with an actress who could
sing, Irene Dunne, while they cast the musical with someone who couldn’t,
director Walter Lang and the sound crew at least deserve credit for matching
Deborah Kerr’s speaking voice and Marni Nixon’s singing voice quite well. The
real auteur is the production
designer, John DeCuir (Lyle Wheeler gets co-credit but that was just a
department-head credit and doesn’t necessarily mean he worked on this specific
film), who had also done the set designs for the stage production and came up
with a stunning world of never-never Siam that probably wasn’t any more like
the real Siam of the 1860’s than it is the real-life Thailand of today.
I first
saw The King and I as an
eight-year-old on a 1961 reissue double bill with the film of Carousel — I also had the movie soundtrack album, which
confused me for years since it contained three songs — “My Lord and Master,”
sung by the slave girl Tuptim (Rita Moreno) in supplication to the king when
she’s presented as a gift from the King of Burma; “I Have Dreamed,” one of the
stage score’s two romantic duets for Tuptim and her true love, fellow Burmese
Lun Tha (Carlos Rivas — so both
the second leads were cast as Latino/as!); and “Shall I Tell You What I Think
of You?,” a marvelously assertive number for Anna in which she makes clear to
us, at least, what she thinks of the King, including the marvelous lines,
referring to how extensively he’s reproduced and the sheer size of his harem,
“A flock of sheep and you the only ram/No wonder you’re the wonder of Siam!” —
that aren’t in the final cut of the movie. I remembered the 1961 prints as a
visual feast — the film was shot in a short-lived process called “CinemaScope
55,” which used a wider (55 instead of 35 mm) film gauge to produce a clearer
image even though they still used the anamorphic-lens technology of the
original CinemaScope process to “squeeze” the wide-screen image onto the film.
MGM had a competing wide-film process called “Window on the World” — the logo
for that one was a globe with a trap door that opened, allowing the camera to
appear — which used 65 mm film, but given that both would have required
different projectors it’s not surprising that The King and I played almost exclusively in 35 mm reduction prints.
(20th Century-Fox booked one New York theatre for the 1961 reissue, equipped it with the 55 mm
projectors and showed the film in CinemaScope 55, but that was the only time
the process was exhibited as intended.)
Alas, by the time I saw it again in a
revival theatre in the 1970’s the color (Fox used their in-house process,
DeLuxe) had badly faded and Leon Shamroy’s stunning cinematography had become a
light-brown murk that made the story look like it was taking place in a mud
bath — so it was nice to get this Blu-Ray restoration and see the film glow in
a way it hadn’t since I was a kid. Plot-wise, this film is very problematic: Charles called it “the last gasp of
Orientalism” and I noted that it’s easy to see why the Thai government has not
allowed any of the film versions
of this story to be shown because they regard it as an insult to King Mongkut,
one of their national historical heroes. Try as he might — Oscar Hammerstein II
was anti-racist long before
anti-racism was cool and he did sympathetic depictions of interracial
relationships in both Show Boat
and South Pacific — he was still
stuck with the whites-good, Asians-not-so-good biases of the original story as
filtered through 19th century British sensibilities. As adapted by
Ernest Lehman (another great talent with imposing credits, including Alfred
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest),
Hammerstein’s book depicts King Mongkut as a man almost constantly at war with
himself, anxious to modernize his country and keep it from being turned into a
European colony the way its neighbors, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Burma, were
during this period (Viet Nam and Cambodia by the French and Burma by the
British) while at the same time unwilling to give an inch in maintaining his
absolute power over everyone in the country: religious, political, economic and
sexual. The key song is his monologue “A Puzzlement,” in which he complains
that things he was brought up to be certain of are being questioned by these
pesky Westerners whom he knows he needs to learn from but at the same time he
can’t comprehend their values — and of course the film assumes that Western
values are automatically superior to Asian ones even when Westerners don’t
always live up to them.
Much of the movie turns on questions of individual
freedom: Anna makes a great plot point of demanding a separate residence for
herself and her young son Louis (Rex Thompson) — just to make sure the King
gets the point, she teaches his kids the song “Home, Sweet Home” and makes them
march around him, singing it — and she also gives Tuptim a copy of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
to help her improve her English. (At least this film makes a plot point that
the Asian characters are learning
English to help them navigate their relations with Europeans; we’re not asked
to believe, as we are in so many American movies set abroad, that everybody in
the world automatically speaks English.) Tuptim naturally analogizes the plot
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin — which she
renames “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” after Anna explains to her that the
word “cabin,” which she’s never encountered before, means “small house” — and
in the film’s climactic scene, she stages an elaborate ballet based on it
(stunningly choreographed by the great Jerome Robbins) that’s a thinly veiled
plea to the King for her own freedom. The King and I is strongest when it dramatizes not only the culture
clash between Anna and the Siamese court but the inner torment of the King and
the disconnect between his desire to modernize technologically and his
determination to maintain his absolute authority — indeed, watching this movie
on the first day of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial probably made
the King seem more Trumpian than he would have otherwise, confident and sure of
himself even when he’s wrong (he dictates a letter to Anna offering to send 100
male elephants to the U.S. so they can start a population, and when Anna tries to tell him that he’ll need to include female
elephants as well, he angrily brushes her aside) and moving through his life
with a sense of hereditary entitlement. It’s also a fascinating study in the
knife’s-edge task of maintaining one’s life and one’s sanity in a court
environment run by someone with literally life-or-death power over everyone else; indeed, this
time around I found myself wondering if the Russian-born Brynner might have
based his characterization of the king on Joseph Stalin.
The King and
I is a marvelous movie overall despite
problems with the casting of the leads: Brynner delivers a high-energy
performance and when he’s standing still (which is rare) or moving he’s
convincingly alien, if not especially Asian, but he’s basically playing the King
the same way he played Ramses in The Ten Commandments and when he starts discussing the story of Moses
with Anna, I couldn’t help but joke that she’d tell him, “Well, when you’re in The
Ten Commandments you can ask him yourself!”
What’s more, at his big raging moments — especially at the end of “A
Puzzlement,” when he’s in full vocal cry — his genuine Russianness comes out
just as Maria Montez’s real-life Latina origins came out when she played an
Arab or Polynesian queen and ended her proclamations with “I have espoken!” And
with Gertrude Lawrence gone Deborah Kerr was probably as good a choice as any —
after all, she’d previously played a similar character (an Englishwoman hired
to be governess in a remote Asian state) in Michael Powell’s Black
Narcissus in 1947 — except that she
couldn’t sing and I couldn’t help wondering what this movie might have been
like with the young Julie Andrews in the role. Andrews later (in 1991) made a
CD of the score of The King and I;
she became a U.S. star in the 1956 Broadway production of My Fair
Lady with Rex Harrison, who’d played King
Mongkut in the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam; her most famous film was The Sound of
Music — also a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about a woman who
becomes governess to the children of a highly strict authority figure; and to
top off her connections to this story, Andrews followed up The Sound
of Music with Star!, a biopic of Gertrude Lawrence, who had created the
role of Anna on stage. — 1/22/20
