As character stereotypes in a movie they’re definitely problematic, but since they’re aliens does it really matter who plays them?
I thought of this when I first started reading this thread (one of my favorite movies, and I saw it last weekend). It also made fun of his not saying prepositions or articles (what is meaning of this).
I was wondering about that when I saw it again. I let it go because it was a spoof (along the same lines as Blazing Saddles).
Dragon Seed (1944) – pretty much the whole cast is in “yellowface”
“Filmed in 1943 on the MGM lot in Culver City, CA, the film features an unusual assortment of non-Asian actors with odd accents playing Chinese and Japanese: Russian-born and Stanislavski-trained Akim Tamiroff as Wu Lien; Turhan Bey, Viennese born son of a Turkish father and Czechoslovakian mother as the middle son, Lao Er Tan; New England patrician Katharine Hepburn as his wife; American Aline MacMahon–no longer one of the wisecracking Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)–as the wife of Ling Tang; English-born Henry Travers (best remembered as Clarence the Angel from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)) as the Third Cousin"; Irish-American J. Carrol Naish as the Japanese Kitchen Overseer; and finally Jewish Robert Lewis, co-founder of the Actors Studio and Meryl Streep’s teacher at the Yale Drama School, as Japanese Capt. Sato.”
Given how awful all of the above look, it’s hard to believe:
“Donna Reed was tested for the role of Orchid Tan, but even with make up did not look believable enough to be an Asian character.” - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036777/trivia/?ref\_=tt_dyk_trv
Saratoga Trunk (1945) – British actress Flora Robson in blackface as a Creole maid with an embarrassing accent - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038053/characters/nm0733460/
The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go (1974) – Another flick with James Mason seriously miscast as a Chinese guy.
Nitpick: Peter Sellers. (Peter Sellars is an American theater director.)
“White, Jewish kid from Chicago” Fisher Stevens playing an Indian scientist (in brown face!) in Short Circuit. He regrets it.
You are right. They are terrible stereotypes, as well as the Neimodian guys who seemed like really offensive Asian stereotypes. But who plays them isn’t really the issue, so it’s not quite what the OP was talking about.
How about Tony Randall in
7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) - IMDb?
I enjoy those written Mysteries.
Well, in Ptolemaic Egypt, not so miscast. But they’d all have animal heads anyway.
The book is not at all fascist. And a lot of Argentinians are blond with blue eyes.
Yeah, I was in a Play of Cleopatra once (bit part) and Cleopatra was played by a black haired Columbian beauty, and she looked the part.
I give that a break, because Dr Lao was also Merlin, and several other worthies. In other words, he was a shapeshifter.
Monty Python had at least 2 example of blackface that I can think of. One was less problematic in my personal opinion because, while it was a full on blackface caricature, it was obviously a satire of the trope itself (Attila the Hun’s servant.) But like others have said, even that wouldn’t fly today.
The other one seemed, in context, worse to me because it didn’t even look like it was satirizing blackface. It was the cannibal cafe sketch, where there was a restaurant in the middle of the jungle whose customers got randomly attacked by natives. The waiter was in blackface but I always initially mistake him for an Indian rather than an African, since it was not a full on caricature, and there are a lot of facial similarities between subcontinental Indians and Europeans, and partly because I as an American am biased to see Indian British.
My only defense of it (other than the concept of the sketch itself) is if they did it because they couldn’t afford another main actor. I had always thought that this was one of the reasons they did other sketches as women, but Google AI disagrees with me.
Yeah because the concept of “black” people was invented by white people a few milenia later. The people of ancient (and hellenized) Egypt were described as “dark skinned”
They did, but Cleopatra did not, she spoke Egyptian and her political support came from Egyptians not greeks. Hence why it’s suggested given the uncertainty about who her mother was that she could have been half Egyptian.
Mention of Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto and Warner Oland as Charley Chan brings up Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Peter Sellers (and others) as Fu Manchu. But Keye Luke, famous for playing NUmber One Son in the Charley Chan movies, actually got to play Chinese detective himself. He played Mr. Wong (the Boris Karloff role) in *Phantom of Chinatown (*1945) – the first time an actor of Chinese descent played Chinese detective. The same year he had a minor role as a “Chinese detective” in the mystery-comedy How DOOoo You Do.
Which leads to an exchange between his character and Sean Bean’s:
Do you believe in God?
Well, my mother is Baptist and my father Hindu…so I believe in several.
Not relevant - I just love The Martian.
Almost certainly not the case, as Tamerlane explains, as has been explored on these boards before. The consensus among serious scholars was that Cleopatra was highly likely to have been of pure (or almost pure) Greek descent. So again, a very poor choice of casting Adele James if an attempt at a realistic potrayal was intended.
It came from both, but the Greek support was the key as they controlled the core of the political and military establishment. She was very canny in appealing to broad popular support to cement her position as a female ruler at the expense of her younger brothers. But that is a testament to her political skills and intelligence, not necessarily (or even likely) sentiment.
There is literally zero verified evidence to suggest that, just a lot of empty speculation. A lot of ink has been spilt on the topic - there is even a very long wikipedia entry on the debate, because of course there is. But for all intents and purposes it’s a “just-so” story.
ETA: But we’re hijacking at this point. I’ll stop 
.
So is that the problem with _________-face actors, that they are doing it to make fun of people of that ethnicity?
What I remember of discussions of black-face specifically was that it originated with minstrel shows, where white actors would perform in exaggerated black face makeup, and portray black people as shiftless, lazy, stupid and so on. I gather these shows were popular and made a lot of money, so there were apparently two goals served: the racist goal of insulting and making fun of black people, and the commercial goal of profitability.
The first I remember hearing reactions against yellow-face acting was probably in the 60s or so, when people wondered why, when there are so many Asian actors around who can’t get work, Asian roles are being done by white people in generally bad makeup. So although there were Asian stereotypes acted by white actors, denigration did not seem to be a significant goal of those roles. Some kind of fairness seemed more to the point, at least at that time.
I think @Just_Asking_Questions has some at least useful points that haven’t been discussed yet. How close to the ethnicity portrayed does the actor have to be? For example, these days East Asians (Chinese, Koreans, Japanese) are often cross-cast as one of the other ethnicities, even though there is a good deal of ethnic animosity and casual “racism” (because I’m not sure what else to call it) among and between some people of those ethnicities. Is that always okay, even when there are plenty of actors of the “correct” ethnicity available instead of the “incorrect” one that was used?
If we assume that denigration is not intended, then, because that would always be wrong, how close does the actor have to be to the role in order to avoid offense? And why, exactly?
Mrs. Meers in Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) as played by the white English/Canadian actress Beatrice Lillie – though this is perhaps one level removed from what’s being discussed here? Mrs. Meers the character is herself in yellowface (disguising herself as Chinese), not merely the actress.
This is a valid point!
As a long time fan of Hawaii 5-0, even as a kid I noticed the reuse of a handful of Asian actors. This also carried over into magnum PI. I started to wonder if there were only a few Asian actors available in all of filmdom:
James Hong (the hardest working actor ever), Chinese
Mako, Japanese
Seth Sakai, Japanese (?)
Soon-Tek Oh, Korean,
All played various Asian roles, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean and Hawaiian, at least, interchangeably. Somehow, it seems more insulting, from this old white guy’s perspective, to cast them as the wrong ethnicity than say, the same of Michael Ansara. It smacks of “all Asians look alike.”
Now using Ross Martin to plan a Hawaiian, or David Opatoshu, to play Chinese, now that’s more bothersome! Why? I don’t know! Maybe because H50 had a larger pool of Asian actors to choose from.
(I had a Korean-American coworker who hated the actors in MASH for their terrible spoken Korean. I guess getting Korean actors wasn’t hard, but getting ones that spoke good Korean was! Too many X-generation Americans in the actor pool.)
Joseph Wiseman as Dr. No.
And FWIW I still thoroughly enjoy Anthony Quinn as Zorba the Greek and Colonel Stavros in The Guns of Navarone. And Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. While their appearance played a part in their landing the roles, the main reason was they were great actors.
Also, Mexican is closer in appearance to Greek (and Ashkenazi to Mexican) than John Wayne is to Mongolian.
Jake Gyllenhaal played a Persian prince in "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time".
The Netflix animated film Over the Moon was criticized for casting mostly Korean voice actors as Chinese characters (in a story that takes place in China, based on a Chinese folktale).