The World of Suzie Wong (Ray Stark; Paramount). The prostitute is the muse of the movies. When business is bad, she is invoked by producers who hope that commercial sex will bring the customers back in slavering hordes. This fall, what with the special distraction of politics and the usual competition of new television shows, movie business has been sluggish. Reaction: a demi-epidemic of pictures about prostitution, the most severe of recent years. Now showing in the U.S.: Never on Sunday, Butterfield 8, Girl of the Night, Port of Desire, Rosemary. And last week Suzie Wong, the biggest (it cost $4,000,000, runs 129 minutes) and possibly the dullest of them all, won a dubious distinction: it became the first trollopera ever to play Manhattan's family-minded cathedral of cinema, Radio City Music Hall.
Adapted from a bestselling novel and Broadway play, Suzie Wong rewinds that limp old yarn about the poor starving artist and the floozy with a heart of gold, but this time the yarn has a new kink in it: miscegenation. The twain meet in Hong Kong, and pretty soon the hero (William Holden) is so crazy about the whoroine (Nancy Kwan) that he cannot tell the difference between good and bawd, white and Wong. Race prejudice and convention pothole the road to romance, but the lovers ride out the bumps.
Technically, the film is respectable. The street and harbor scenes in the crown colony bustle with color, the interiors are ingratiatingly ratty. Literarily, the picture is a mad chow mein of Chinese-laundry English, doused with a sickly marmalade of sentiment and soy-sauced now and then by a daffy line (prostitute announcing her baby's name: "Weenston. Hees fader velly importan' man"). Dramatically, it is just one long touristic stagger through the better bars and restaurants of Hong Kong.
The direction (Richard Quine) is vague, and the principals are rigidly confined in miscasts. Actor Holden looks more like an aging bellboy than an artist. As for Actress Kwan, an Anglo-Chinese cutie born in Hong Kong and trained in London's Royal Ballet school, she looks more like Piccadilly than Wanchai. And the film's sentimental, sanitized conception of the Oriental prostitute as a sort of rising young calendar girl who graciously takes her turn as a U.S.O. hostess will seem a cruel jest to the undernourished minions of Asia's vast sex industry, many of them dead of disease or exhaustion long before they reach the heroine's comparatively advanced age: 21.
The Love Same (AJAM; Films Around the World). "Up!" the young man (Jean-Pierre Cassel) chirps as he leaps briskly out of bed. "Grmpf!" protests the pile of bedclothes (Genevieve Cluny) he has left behind, "you didn't wake me up the usual way!" The young man looks appalled at his forgetfulness, leaps almost to the ceiling, lands back in bed. "A votre service!" he bellows.