'THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG'........WHEN BILL COULDN'T TELL WHITE FROM WONG.......

The World Of Suzie Wong (1960)   A real curio, this one.......in that it straddles the painful, awkward transition that big studio films were trying to make.........moving from standard, stolid, old-school 40's and 50's movie-making into more bold, previously taboo thematic material.......

          And doubly ironic, it's the second movie featuring top-o-the-heap leading man William Holden carrying on a generally frowned-upon romance with an Asian woman......(the first being 1955's stately, turgid "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing", candy-coating things by having Bill's Eurasian sweetie played by Jennifer Jones....)

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           By l960,  more films tried pushing their luck with the Production Code censors.......(and we would have killed to sit in on the meetings to get "Suzie Wong" past them....)

           This time around, Bill Holden's Hong Kong squeeze is not only a prostitute, but she's played by a real Asian.......and what a hotter-than-the-sun, instant star this movie found in Nancy Kwan.

            Kwan, a stunning beauty and a skilled actress, seizes this typically bloated studio product by the throat and makes it her own........for 2 hours, you can't take your eyes off her, waiting to see how she'll react in any scene........(a far cry from our aborted attempt to re-watch "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing"....we couldn't get through more than ten minutes of its oil-painting pacing...)

              She's the only factor that makes this movie still watchable 58 years later, flashing her eyes and curves as a live-wire mercurial hooker who falls into an unlikely love affair with Holden, playing a 9 to 5 draftsman who takes a year off to live the life of a starving artist.

             It's one crazy mash-up.......the film still keeps the lumbering pace of  a 1950's movie yet constantly dazzles the eye with cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth's Hong Kong location shooting, neatly blended with teeming streets recreated on a British sound stage.  Meanwhile, Nancy Kwan scampers through the whole thing as if it's "Gidget Turns Tricks In Hong Kong".......(so feisty and adorable, we could have watched her for another 2 hours)

             The whole hooker part of the film is naturally sanitized to avoid the howling wrath and snipping scissors of the Production Code gang.......Kwan and her coterie of prostitutes look more like a bunch to cute sorority sisters, only with tighter skirts.  In that regard, this film's every bit as much of a fairy tale as the 30 years later "Pretty Woman"..... (including a scene where Holden won't allow a waiter to sneer at Kwan's illiteracy when she struggles with a menu).

            But it's still 1960, and traditional sexual mores and values wreak havoc with Holden's conflicted, on-and-off-again romance with Kwan.........in the film's most bizarre, startling moment, Holden angrily strips a dress off Kwan, throwing it out the window......repulsed and disgusted at the sight of her dolled up like a completely Westernized girl.  (Yep, it's as cringe-worthy as it sounds)

           And the race card gets played, as it must, with Holden's uncomfortable interactions with the bunch of colonial-type Brits he periodically socializes with........(with Sylvia Sims in the thankless role of an English girl who sees Holden as her last hope for a husband)

            William Holden does his usual sturdy work, but as as we said, Nancy Kwan's the whole show here and no major Hollywood film before this had served as such a star-making showcase for an Asian actress.   For her and her alone, we'll give "The World Of Suzie Wong" 3 stars (***)......still worth a look for its incandescent leading lady.