The World of Suzie Wong (1960)

To be perfectly honest, The World of Suzie Wong is not a great film. Aside from the slight shock of its subject matter in its day, the film may not be remembered by anyone except for die-hard William Holden fans. And even then, it may be a little painful for Holden fans to watch.

By 1960, alcoholism had taken its hold on Bill, and his face and acting had started to show it. His performance in The World of Suzie Wong is, as critic Leonard Maltin put it, “sluggish” at times. Further, there are aspects of the film that make it glaringly obvious you are watching a Hollywood picture, and the film tends to look dated to us now. However, it also has many strong points.

Holden plays an American artist who has chucked his office job for one year, so he can go to Hong Kong and try to make a go of painting. If he cannot do it in a year, he will quit his dreaming and return to the world of commercial architecture. While in Hong Kong, he meets two different women who present two different paths for him: the rich and British Kay, who would gladly support him financially while he paints and escorts her to her father’s dinner parties. The second is Suzie Wong (Nancy Kwan), a Chinese bar girl (i.e. prostitute) who senses in Holden’s character a romantic and honorable love she has been deprived of all her life.

One path leads to cultural and romantic desolation. The other means throwing his lot in with a poor prostitute and dealing with the harsher realities of life, including becoming ostracized as a white man who marries a Chinese woman.

I did find this film engaging and somewhat surprised at how graphically it attempted to deal with conditions in British colonial Hong Kong. While there is cliché and discomfort in the Orientalist vision of Chinese “ladies of pleasure,” the Chinese are not mere caricatures, and the film takes an overt stance on the dehumanization of Asians in the colonies. Further, the romance is stirring and mature, and Holden’s sluggish performance actually works in the second half, as the idealistic painter faces his choices, and the certainty of having to return to his desk job and spiritual suffocation.

Overall, not a classic, but certainly a serviceable picture and solid entertainment for fans of the romance genre.


Sponsor Me!