[These are the 18 'problematic' classic films TCM will examine in a new series]

On 3/21/2021 at 6:36 AM, TopBilled said:

 I really don't see Mickey Rooney going out of his way to accept a part in a prestigious "A" budget film just so he can intentionally hatemonger. He and Edwards were approaching this in a way that was childish and immature, not deliberate or destructive. 

I completely agree.  Rooney maintained he'd followed Edwards' instruction to play the character broadly, and that's what he did.   To me, based on Edwards' generally ham-handed approach to comedy and Rooney's penchant for stretching a role to maximize laughs, it's perfectly plausible.   That's why I think TCM's hosts missed the mark  focusing solely on wartime hatred as the seed-bed for the Yunioshi role as played by Rooney.   Ever since it became clear that the U.S would ultimately beat Japan, governmental policy had been to temper outright hate against the Japanese people (as opposed to the military machine) knowing that otherwise postwar coexistence would be mutually intolerable.   Mutual toleration between the two countries benefitted Japanese-Americans (and most Asians in the U.S., I'd venture to say) tremendously.  The unfolding of those years was very successful in leaching out a lot of earlier hatred (and hatefulness) and replacing negative Japanese stereotypes with generally positive ones.  Of course they were still stereotypes, not all of them unhurtful, and in childish and immature performances, they could sometimes be cringingly bad.   

[These are the 18 'problematic' classic films TCM will examine in a new series]

On 3/17/2021 at 1:17 PM, TopBilled said:

What will the wraparounds include about Mickey Rooney's performance?

The coverage on March 18, though obviously well-meaning was fairly simplistic, possibly mandated by the current wave of anti-Asian violence making it obligatory to relate the Yunioshi character to hateful wartime depictions of Japanese.  At any rate, war-borne sentiment was the tack taken by Joe Mankiewicz, making the point that with WW2 having ended only 16 years prior, American sensibilities circa 1961, the release year of Breakfast, were inured to such depictions and thus probably unfazed by Rooney’s depiction of the Yunioshi character.  I remember 1961 and I remember Breakfast, and while it’s probably right that the majority of Americans weren’t particularly upset by the portrayal, I think that to relate general acceptance of the character to American wartime animosities is a distortion of the period and of how out-of-place Rooney’s Yunioshi was for a contemporaneous depiction of a Japanese national then living in NYC.  Mankiewicz’ thesis ignores quite a bit about the period, such as the reality that U.S policy was to depict Japan and the Japanese in the postwar era in a favorable light  whenever possible; that these favorable depictions were willingly reinforced by returning occupation-era GIs whose impressions of the Japanese were by and large positive; that in Hollywood romantic relationships and intermarriage between Japanese nationals and Americans were being sympathetically depicted in such movies as Sayonara (Marlon Brando, Miiko Taka, based on the Michener novel), and Bridge to the Sun (James Shigeta, Carroll Baker, based on the Gwen Terasaki memoir); that by the time of Breakfast’s production a fair amount of interest in Japanese cinema itself had developed, starting  with the U.S. release of Seven Samurai and Ugetsu around 1953, eventually eclipsing filmdom’s earlier fascination with the neorealismo of Italian films of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s; that by the year of Breakfast’s release Kyo Sakamoto in Japan had a huge hit with “Ue O Muite Arukou,” which within two years would top the charts in the U.S. (albeit under the meaningless title “Sukiyaki”); that the name “Sony” was rapidly becoming a synonym for “transistor radio” in American households and transforming the phrase “Made in Japan” from an epithet into a hallmark of quality; that the retailer Takashimaya, which opened in 1957-58 on Fifth Avenue in NYC, was by Breakfast’s release one of the most-visited destination department stores in Manhattan.  The Yunioshi portrayal in 1961 can’t be explained by saying, “Well, we hated them anyway.”  None of this is to say there was no animosity left over from the war, or that Mankiewicz was wrong to acknowledge it.  But a lot had changed and had displaced wartime hatred with other emotions and perceptions, not all positive, but none as simple as hating the enemy in war.  In great part, the reason Rooney’s Yunioshi was so toxic is not because the bigotry embodied in it was hateful, but because, at that date, it could be so casually delivered.

Another item referred to in the postlude was a 2008 protest launched locally by Asian Americans in Sacramento when Breakfast was to be screened at a city-sponsored showing.  Noting the then-Vice Mayor’s decision to delete the major objectionable Yunioshi scene and use the whole matter as what he called a “teaching moment,” Mankiewicz pointed out that TCM doesn’t do that kind of thing and tossed it to Alicia Fowler, who explained why scene deletion is a bad thing.  It should be noted that the AA group that opposed the screening didn’t advocate deletion of the offensive scenes, and at least once during the controversy pointed out that post hoc editing of a film’s offending parts wasn’t an appropriate way of meeting concerns over bigoted content.  Ultimately the movie was shown uncut, accompanied by an agreed statement acknowledging the presence of content not considered appropriate under contemporary standards.