Bridge to the Sun
France/US, 1961, 113’, English, Japanese
Directed by: Etienne Périer
Screenplay: Charles Kaufman, Gwendolen Terasaki
Photography (b/w): William J. Kelly, Kitsuke Seiichi, Marcel Weiss
Producer: Jacques Bar
Production Companies: Cité Films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Cast: Carroll Baker, James Shigeta
Based on the memoir of Gwen Harold Terasaki, Bridge to the Sun tells the true story of the romance between Tennessee-born Gwen (Carroll Baker) and Japanese diplomat, Terry Terasaki, played honestly and affectingly by James Shigeta, just two years after his debut in The Crimson Kimono (1959). Regarded as Hollywood’s response to the towering Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Périer’s film is a more realistic and dramatic portrayal of an interracial relationship between a Caucasian woman and an Asian man.
After meeting at a diplomatic reception in the United States in the thirties, the two fall in love, marry, and move to Japan. There, Gwen grapples with cultural differences and social biases, and Terry is posted back to Washington D.C. just before the attack on Pearl Harbour. With the two nations at war, the couple is torn between staying close to their loved ones, and keeping loyal to their own nation – these challenges compound an already challenging interracial marriage. Racial and gender differences are often at the forefront of the narrative.
The film’s emotionally charged ending sees an infirm Terry determined to spare Gwen and their daughter witnessing the pain of his protracted death. He bids farewell to them as they sail off to America. Gwen and Terry desperately hold each other’s gaze for as long as possible.
If Hiroshima mon amour, The Crimson Kimono and Year of the Dragon (1985) depict the beautiful, sensual beginning of an interracial relationship, Bridge to the Sun takes a pragmatic stance, examining the reality of such a romance. After Gwen’s relocation to Japan, the film charts her negotiation with the domestic environment, and her struggles to cope with the perceptions and expectations of Terry’s friends and relatives. The struggle is two-fold. When she confronts the Japanese patriarchy, which she had likely never expected in her husband, Terry reprimands her for “forgetting your [her] place as a wife of my household” after she breaks the taboo by offering her opinion at his table.
King Vidor’s Japanese War Bride (1952) offers an interesting parallel. Here, a US soldier returns home from the Korean war with his Japanese wife (Shirley Yamaguchi), only for both, especially the wife, to be confronted with the pride and prejudice of his American family and friends. Gentle and subservient, the wife is rendered a flat image, an attractive and exotic “other” with qualities that fit into popular imagination of the East. The gender and racial politics in Vidor’s film could be seen as representative of the White man’s ideological impulse to stereotype and contain the Oriental.
In response to Terry’s anger, Gwen firmly argues she is sick of a place where women are treated like “furniture.” Later, Terry makes up with Gwen and resolves that he doesn’t want a “Japanese wife”. Whilst Gwen’s endeavours to establish her identity is accepted, the Japanese war bride is not afforded the same privilege.
Gina Marchetti aptly observed the ambiguity of this reconciliation in her book Romance and the “Yellow Peril”, “Terry’s acceptance […] carries with it a wealth of contradictory interpretations,” it can be looked at as an acceptance of Gwen’s feminist stance, but also as an affirmation of the “superiority of American values of individualism.”
The capacity for open reading makes Bridge to the Sun an endlessly interesting text. It is also in this sense that Périer’s film offers a progressive view (partly thanks to the reality presented in Gwen’s book) of an interracial romance in which the subjectivity of both sides are equally acknowledged, all the while underlining how unprepared the world is to feel comfortable about it.
Etienne Périer
Born in 1931 in Belgium, Etienne Périer was a writer and director, best known for the two films he was contracted to make for MGM: Swordsman of Siena (1962), a swashbuckler with Stewart Granger; and Bridge to the Sun (1961), an interracial romance based on a true story.
Since 1981, he has been working mainly on TV dramas. He passed away in 2020.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1960 – Murder at 45 R.P.M.
1961 – Bridge to the Sun
1962 – Swordsman of Siena
1971 – Zeppelin
1979 – Un si joli village...
Kiki Fung