At the SAG Awards in January, the triumphant cast of Everything Everywhere All at Once dedicated most of their ensemble award acceptance speech to a single person: 94-year-old James Hong, taking home his first major award after a 70-year Hollywood career. “My first movie was with Clark Gable,” he said onstage, referencing the 1955 war film Soldier of Fortune. “But back then the producers said the Asians were not good enough, and they are not box office. But look at us now!“
A Minnesota native and Korean War veteran, Hong entered the movie industry at a time when it was still common for Asian characters to be played by white actors in yellowface. But he was part of the era’s single, major exception, and what remains one of glaringly few Hollywood films led by an Asian cast. In 1961’s Flower Drum Song, Hong appears briefly as the maitre d at a San Francisco nightclub, one of many times he’d play staff at a Chinese restaurant. But this time, Hong was sharing the screen with major Asian stars of the moment—like Miyoshi Umeki, who had won an Oscar a few years earlier for Sayanora, or James Shigeta, whose career spanned from the original Perry Mason to Beverly Hills 90210. Adapted from the hit Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which itself was adapted from Chin Yang Lee‘s novel, Flower Drum Song was utterly unique for Hollywood at the time. As the enthusiasm about Everything Everywhere’s groundbreaking success reminds us, it remains unique today.
On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, in honor of AAPI Heritage Month, we look back at Flower Drum Song and its place in Hollywood, as the era of big-budget musicals neared its end. It was nominated for five Oscars but had the odd misfortune of being released the same year as West Side Story, which beat it in every category. Flower Drum Song feels dated in some ways, including the casting of Japanese actors as Chinese characters. But musical numbers like “Grant Avenue” and “Sunday” feel as lively now as they were then, and revelatory for anyone discovering talents like Nancy Kwan, a breakout star of the early 1960s who, like so many of her Flower Drum Song cast mates, didn’t find more opportunities in Hollywood that were commensurate to her talent.
A sidebar about Nancy Kwan: in the late 1960s she had a role in The Wrecking Crew, sharing a fight scene with Sharon Tate. It’s the scene you see Margot Robbie watching gleefully in the theater in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kwan did have a long Hollywood career, though, including a role on ER as the mother of Ming-Na Wen’s character; our own Rebecca Ford reunited the pair in 2019. Wen spoke about the influence Kwan’s performance in Flower Drum Song had on her: “To see someone young and vibrant and sassy who’s an Asian American, it just really spoke to me.”
Listen to this week‘s Little Gold Men above, and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Katey Rich
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