Cinema: The Inscrutable East

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Cry for Happy (Columbia) may make American audiences yawn for sleepy. Apparerftly intended as a slapstick Sayonara, this $3,000,000, Eastman-Colored tub of sukiyaki involves a team of Navy combat photographers (Glenn Ford and Donald O'Connor) in a feckless furlough with some geishas (Miiko Taka and Miyoshi Umeki, the heroines of Sayonara).

The photographers get plenty of promising negatives, but further developments are out of the question. Geishas, according to this script, are nice girls—sort of like nuns with cabaret cards. At first the sailors refuse to believe it. He (eagerly): "Do you speak English?" She (icily): "I tried it once." Ultimately, the sailors acknowledge that geishas are—as the boys put it—"inscrutable." At the fade they are all mixed up in a multiple interdenominational wedding that looks vaguely Shintopalian and makes enough noise to wake the audience up. Obviously, the most effective member of the cast is not Glenn Ford—it's the Japanese sandman.