Cinema: East Meets East

A Girl Named Tamiko is a Panavision melting pot. British Actor Laurence Harvey, who was born in Lithuania, plays a half-Russian, half-Chinese photographer in Tokyo who wants to go to the U.S. France Nuyen, who was born in Marseille of a French mother and a Chinese father, plays Tamiko, a highborn Japanese girl who wants Harvey. Martha Hyer, who is as American as a mink-lined raincoat in July, also wants Harvey, and so does Miyoshi Umeki, an honest-to-Buddha Japanese, who plays a Ginza B-girl.

Surprisingly enough, beneath all the sukiyaki, Producer Hal Wallis has put together an entertaining little picture; the neon wetness of Tokyo streets and the misty watercolors of the countryside in the exterior shots lend a much needed credibility to the convolutions of the plot. Harvey wants a visa to the U.S. Hyer, as a receptionist at the U.S. embassy, is willing to expedite it, provided he comes to terms, her terms. Nuyen counters by finding work for him in Japan to prove that despite his Sino-Russian origins and his British accent, he has a future there. Hyer ripostes with a hot scene in Harvey's red-lit dark room: "Have you ever had a white girl?" And it looks as if the West has won.

France Nuyen makes one last try. It involves a weekend at Lake Biwa, a sort of Nipponese Grossinger's, where she has arranged for Harvey to shoot some pictures. With the rain pelting on the roof of the bungalow, she serves dinner on the floor, lets down her hair, and the background music comes to a crescendo. (The theme, mystifyingly, seems to be something that Composer Elmer Bernstein remembered from Composer Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story.-)

Tamiko, while obviously oriented toward afternoon audiences, occidentally manages to give an up-to-date twist to a story that was old when David Belasco wrote Madame Butterfly.