flower drum song

Featuring only one truly memorable song, "I Enjoy Being a Girl," (don't even try to convince me that "100,000,000 Miracles" is memorable) the plot of Flower Drum Song plays like a 1940's romantic screwball comedy, which is good when you rely on great characters, not tepid songs, to propel the silliness of the script. Here we get bad songs and the dullest of characters, not the least of which is Mei Li, one of the pivotal female leads. The film's bright point is the character Sammy Fong, who at least does some great Dean Martin-esque mugging for the camera. Linda Low (Nancy Kwan) also deserves some credit for having substantial screen presence, but the material she has to work with is pretty sad.

I'm glad that Rodgers and Hammerstein wanted to do something to expose the world to different aspects of Asian culture, but I don't think that even at the time it was a very enlightened piece. If you enjoy bad pidgin and Asian actors being overdubbed, then Flower Drum Song is right up your alley.