June 9 movie: Lady of the Tropics. Another tragic melodrama about ill-fated love between an Asian and a Caucasian. This one stars Robert Taylor as an American playboy and Hedy Lamarr as a half-Vietnamese, half-French woman living in Saigon. This movie must have been shocking at the time: when Taylor falls for Lamarr, he ditches his American fiancee and actually marries Lamarr. They're happily married for a time, although she can't leave the country so they're trapped in Saigon with dwindling finances. [spoiler] Eventually she tries to help him by whoring herself out, gets caught, kills a man and then conveniently kills herself just before Taylor would have to make good on his promise to take her back to America.
This movie was almost as objectionable as The Bitter Tea of General Yen but not nearly as bad as Broken Blossoms. Anti-Vietnamese prejudice is depicted as a bad thing, although in the end the movie does seem to agree that ethnic groups should not mix. It has the advantage of starring two of 1939's best looking actors, who have great chemistry together. And making Lamarr's character only half Vietnamese meant they didn't bother with the horrible eye makeup, which I learned from TCM's guest expert is called "yellow face." They did put the eye makeup on Joseph Schildkraut, who played a ridiculously unconvincing Vietnamese villain.
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