Last Saturday night, March 25, after my husband Charles and I watched the 1970 World War II biopic Patton, I had planned to switch from TCM to the Lifetime channel to watch a new “premiere” movie called Every Breath She Takes – yet another knock-off of Sleeping with the Enemy in which an abused wife whose husband presumably died in a fire in their home seems to be alive and stalking her, while the police investigate whether she deliberately set the fire that presumably killed him – but my husband Charles had other ideas.(The Lifetime movie is being reshown this Saturday at 6 p.m. just before the network’s latest “premiere,” Stalked by Her Past.) He wanted me to stay on TCM to watch the 1987 biopic The Last Emperor, a multi-Academy Award-winning film (it was nominated for nine awards and won all of them, including Best Picture) which, much to my surprise, Charles insisted he’d never seen before. During its theatrical release Charles was living with his mother in Grass Valley,California, a remote old mining town that had only one movie theatre, run by a quirky film buff who would get interesting foreign films as well as U.S. releases. Alas, the week he was scheduled to show The Last Emperor there was an accident with the print; it unspooled itself and the owner announced it would take about an hour or so to get it s howable again, so instead he told everyone to come back and see a different movie the next week for free. I first saw the film on VHS tape, which I got from the Columbia House (I believe), and I’m surprised I never ran it for Charles during the years it sat in my collection.
The Last Emperor was the story of Pu Yi (played by four different actors: Richard Vuu at age three, Tijger Tsou at eight, Wu Tao at 15 and the film’s star, John Lone, as an adult), wh o at age six was proclaimed by the Empress Dowager as tne new Emperor of China just before her own death in 1908. It was directed by BErnardo Bertolucci, who had a penchant for stories about people trapped in the political, social or sexual intrigues of their times, and was written by Mark Peoloe, with an assist from Bertolucci himself, based on Pu Yi’s autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen, with an initial draft by Enzo Ungari. This time around I was amazed by the two aspects of the movie that had impressed me the first time around: the wretched absurdity of Pu Yi’s life at court in the Forbidden City of Beijing (then called Peking, based on a different transliteration of the Chinese name) and the most controversial part of Pu Yi’s life, his acceptance of the throne of Pu Yi’s native Manchuria, which the Japanese renamed “Manchukuo,” albeit as just a puppet controlled by the Japanese occupiers. Pu Yi’s life at court is a bizarre series of rituals in which everybody around him has to pretend that this boy, who just likes to play with his older brother and do boy-like things, is the divinely inspired ruler of China and has to be worshiped as practically a god on earth. (One wonders if Romulus Agustulus, the four-year-old who briefly sat on the throne of the Western Roman Empire before its final fall at the hands of invading Germans, went through the same thing.)
To give the young Pu Yi the education he would need to fulfill his duties as Emperor when he reached adulthood, the court hires a British tutor, Reginald Johnson (Peter O’Toole, who since his star-making turn in Lawrence of Arabia 25 years before had been expert at playing well-meaning Brits screwing up Third World countries). Meanwhile, the Manchu Dynasty finally falls in 1911 and China becomes a rep;ublilc; Johnson explains to Pu Yi that within the walls of the Forbidden City, which he is no longer allowed to leave, he’s still an emperor; but outside int he rest of China he’s just another man and China is now ruled not by an emperor but a president. When the republican government of China finally decides to stop spending the insane amount of money it takes to maintain the zombie court in the Forbidden City and its residents, including its eunuchs, Pu Yi drifts into a playboy-like existence. We see him hanging out in dance clubs and ballrooms where, in one of the marvelous uses of music in this film, a jazz band is playing the rancidly racist song “China Boy.” (The lyrics are so bad – they start, “China boy, go sleep,” and go downhill from there – that of all the versions I have of this song, only one, Louis Prima’s, isn’t an instrumental.)
Pu Yi’s wife, Wan Jung (Joan Chen), tries to warn him about his increasing infatuation with the Japanese, but he doesn’t take her seriously because he’s lost interest in her due to her opium addiction (Pu Yi is especially anti-drug since opium killed his mother) and her interest in alternative sex partners, both men and women. She’s shown in a bizarre scene of kissing feet with one of her girlfriends, and at the same time she has an affair with the family chauffeur, Chang (Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa). She gets pregnant by Chang and announces to Pu Yi that he’s gong to have an heir, but the Japanese running his government tell him the baby is not his and the kid is born dead anyway. Pu Yi is recruited to the Japanese cause, at le3ast according to the script of this film, becuasehe’s told that the Nationalists who took over china when the Empire fell have desecrated the Mongolian tombs of his ancestors, and he also seems to believe the Japanese want him as an actual governing partner and not just a figthrehea. The film is structured in a series of flashbacks from 1950, when Pu Yi has been arrested by Soviet forces in China and turned over to Mao Zedong’s new Communist Chinese government for a long prison sentence during which he’s subjected to what the Communists call “re-education” and the rest of the world labeled “brainwashing.” He’s finally released in 1959 and spends the rest of his life working – literally – as a gardener, though a year before his death in 1967 he sees his old prison camp commander being dragged throught hestreets and forced to wear a dunce cap on his head by the Red Guards, young thugs who were mobilized by Communist leader Mao Zedong as part of his late-1970’s “Cultural Revolution.” In vain he protests that he knows this man and he’s a good man that doesn’t deserve his public humiliation, only to be pushed away and his own position jeopardized.
The Last Emperor was the first time a Western film company was allowed to shoot in China since the Communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949, though this also meant the Chinese government had approval rights over the script. In the end they passed it with only minor changes, and it’s possible that at the time the film was made, the current Chinese leader was Deng Xiaoping, who had condemned Mao’s widow and the other members for the so-called “Gang of Four” and turned China from an egalitarian (albeit repressive) Communist country into a giant sweatshop for the world’s capitalists. Doubtless Deng didn’t mind a project that made Mao’s people and his era look bad. I quite liked The Last Emperor both the first time I saw it and now; it’s an example of good historical dramatization, and though one can imagine more subtleties in Pu Yi’s character that didn’t get depicted, John Lone’s outrage at the way the Japanese are treating him and how he isn’t fulfilling h is long-awaited destiny to be a real emperor in his role as the Japanese puppet ruler of “Manchukuo” is utterly convincing, as is his naïveté at ever believing the Japanese were going to treat him any other way.And it did strike me as interesting that within two days Charles and I had seen three films – The Great Dictator, Patton and The Last Emperor – that dealt, ini profoundly different ways, with World War II.
