Inn of the Sixth Happiness
Here’s what you see if you are home watching PBS on a Saturday night. A too-long 1958 movie loosely based on the life of Gladys Aylward, an English missionary to China in the 1930s. By “loosely,” I mean that the five-foot-even, dark-haired Aylward is played by, um, Ingrid Bergman, and the central feature of her life story is her romance with a half-Chinese soldier who never actually existed. But at 2 hours and 40 minutes, it would hardly have been watchable with a short, dumpy actress in the lead and only her stoicism to sustain us. Even with the intercultural romance, you may need a glass of scotch to propel you past the two-hour mark.
The movie is really interesting as a period piece, though. First of all, it raises a lot of questions about race. Why, for example, did they have to make the fictional love interest half white? Was that the only way to make the interracial romance more acceptable, and was it a decision the film’s producers made of their own accord, or are we seeing the hand of censorship at work? And although the actors who play the main Chinese characters are just as white as they can be, the couple hundred extras do appear to be genuinely Asian-— Northeast Asian, not South Asian. Who knew there were so many Chinese child actors in 1958 Britain?
Then there’s the way they deal with the language issue. Apparently subtitles were not an option here, either because the Western viewing public wouldn’t stand for them or because the main Chinese characters didn’t speak Chinese. So very little actual Chinese is spoken in the movie, and the actors use different fluencies of ENGLISH to indicate whether their characters are speaking Chinese or not. When they are meant to be speaking Chinese, the actors speak fluent British English, to indicate that the *characters* are using their native language. And when the characters are meant to be speaking English, the actors speak a halting pidgin English, to indicate their awkwardness in a second language. Got it? As a way of implying bilingualism without using subtitles, it works pretty well. But for verisimilitude, it seems to me they should have made Ingrid Bergman speak pidgin English when her character was speaking Chinese.
The movie is really interesting as a period piece, though. First of all, it raises a lot of questions about race. Why, for example, did they have to make the fictional love interest half white? Was that the only way to make the interracial romance more acceptable, and was it a decision the film’s producers made of their own accord, or are we seeing the hand of censorship at work? And although the actors who play the main Chinese characters are just as white as they can be, the couple hundred extras do appear to be genuinely Asian-— Northeast Asian, not South Asian. Who knew there were so many Chinese child actors in 1958 Britain?
Then there’s the way they deal with the language issue. Apparently subtitles were not an option here, either because the Western viewing public wouldn’t stand for them or because the main Chinese characters didn’t speak Chinese. So very little actual Chinese is spoken in the movie, and the actors use different fluencies of ENGLISH to indicate whether their characters are speaking Chinese or not. When they are meant to be speaking Chinese, the actors speak fluent British English, to indicate that the *characters* are using their native language. And when the characters are meant to be speaking English, the actors speak a halting pidgin English, to indicate their awkwardness in a second language. Got it? As a way of implying bilingualism without using subtitles, it works pretty well. But for verisimilitude, it seems to me they should have made Ingrid Bergman speak pidgin English when her character was speaking Chinese.
posted by thirdpartydreamer at 2:41 PM
1 Comments:
I will probably never see this movie, but I must say, the idea of Ingrid Bergman speaking pidgin English is delightful!
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