Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood (Kali Pictures, Wichita Films, Orange Cinéma Séries, Deskpop Entertainment, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Monday, May 6) Turner Classic Movies showed two films as part of a month-long series on representations of Asians and Asian-Americans in U.S. films. The first was a documentary called Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood, written and directed by sisters Clara and Julia Kuperberg, and the second was China Sky, a 1945 World War II movie about two American doctors running a mission hospital in a small Chinese village. “Yellowface,” analogous to “blackface,” meant the practice of casting Asian roles with white actors, ostensibly for commercial reasons. Non-white actors in classic Hollywood were locked into a double bind: they were rejected for leading roles because of their color, and because they were rejected for leading roles they never made the “A”-list, so casting directors had an excuse not to consider them for leads. The Kuperbergs and one of their interviewees, Nancy Wang Yuen, argued that the old Motion Picture Production Code’s prohibition against “miscegenation” forbade the casting of a white and an Asian actor in characters that had a romantic relationship. An imdb.com “Goofs” poster argued that this was incorrect, saying that the actual text of the Production Code defined “miscegenation” as “sex relationships between the white and black races,” and therefore technically did not apply to relationships between whites and non-Black people of color. But enough of the Code’s enforcers and casting directors argued that it did that the effect of the Code was to forbid all mixed-race couples on screen. Ironically, while until 1949 mixed-race marriages were forbidden in all U.S. states, a lot of the anti-miscegenation laws banned them only if one of the partners were white. At least in some states, there were no bans against one person of color marrying a different sort of person of color, which is one reason why so many important U.S. musicians – including Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Oscar Pettiford and Jimi Hendrix – were part African-American and part Native American. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court cited the number of mixed-race marriage bans that only barred them if one of the partners were white as one of the grounds for ruling all anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in 1967.

Yellowface was a good documentary but it tried in only an hour to do too much, shifting from the practice of casting white actors in Asian roles (and its modern-day equivalent, which is rewriting films derived from comic books so characters who were visibly Asian in the comics are either white or racially ambiguous, and therefore playable by white actors, in the films) to a denunciation of the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, then back to a few pioneering films made in the 1950’s that actually used Asian actors to play Asian characters, including Joshua Logan’s Sayonara (in which Marlon Brando, who previously was cast in a particularly obnoxious bit of “yellowface” as the Okinawan Sakini in The Teahouse of the August Moon, and Red Buttons played American servicemembers in the post-World War II occupation who fall in love with Japanese women) and Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (in which an Irish-American and a Japanese-American cop are partners) and The Crimson Kimono (made and set in Japan). Also the Kuperbergs go back and forth between acknowledging the vast variety of backgrounds and cultures that originate in Asia and focusing almost exclusively on Japan. They end the documentary with two films they hold up as models for the sympathetic depiction of Asians: Come See the Paradise (1990), in which an American projectionist at a Japanese-owned theatre in 1936 falls in love with the theatre owner’s daughter, only to lose her to the World War II internment; and Crazy Rich Asians (2018). I’ve never seen Come See the Paradise, but there’s this rather snippy comment about it on the “Trivia” section on the film’s imdb.com page: “The movie ranks at the No. #1 spot on the top 10 list of most ‘Oscar-bait’ movies ever made according to research by UCLA sociologists Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke. According to the Web site 'Wikipedia,” this movie is ‘the most deliberate example of Oscar bait in their study of 3,000 films released since 1985. The identification is based on various elements calculated to be likely to draw Oscar nominations, including the previous nominations of [director Alan] Parker, the film's setting in Hollywood (including Dennis Quaid's projectionist character), and its depiction of a tragic historical event against the background of war and racism. It was only released in a few cities during the last week of that year to make it eligible for the awards. However, it was not nominated for any Oscars and failed at the box office.”

One of the reviewers of Yellowface on imdb.com suggested that the only reason the Kuperbergs featured Come See the Paradise as prominently as they did was because Tamlyn Tomita, who played the female lead, was a major interviewee for their film. I have seen Crazy Rich Asians and I enjoyed it, less because of its depiction of Asians and its use of an all-Asian cast (though the drop-dead gorgeous leading man, Henry Golding, was the product of a mixed-race relationship between a British father and a Malaysian mother) than because it was a delightful return to the world of 1930’s “screwball” comedy. And, though the movie was praised in the U.S. for its strong and multi-dimensional Asian characters, it was critiqued both in China and in Singapore (where the “Asian” parts of the story take place, after an opening in New York City). As I noted in my moviemagg blog post on it (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/09/crazy-rich-asians-warner-bros-sk-global.html), “[I]t was criticized in Singapore for making it look as if virtually the whole Singaporean population is Chinese — and it was criticized by Chinese because, though all the actors were Asian, most of them weren’t actually Chinese.”