arwebevenstar

Russell Crowe's movie, The Sum of Us, can be found at Amazon.com for $12.95 (dvd version). They also have it on VHS, too. Available new or used...What is hilarious, is it has subtitles!?! The subtitles are in English, French & Spanish. According to the "powers to be" I need to have a minimum of ten lines or my "comment" won't be considered valid, so I'm trying to extend so I can share this info of where to find this movie with other film fans. A very cute looking Russell Crowe is on the cover...So what happened to him since then? Haven't checked Barnes & Noble's website for the film. I hope I don't get blocked for trying to make this entry long enough to be able to get the information out...

I had been delighted to find that TCM was showing this, as I love the 1992 version with Josie Lawrence, Jim Broadbent, Joan Plowright...This film had a luminous Ann Harding, a wonderful performance by Frank Morgan, but others' acting made the film more of a farce then the wonderful unfolding that the later film. Reginald Owen's Arbuthnot is painful to watch and you can't understand why his wife adores him. I found out after watching the film that it was based on the stage play where the 1992 film is based on the book. The original film also felt like it was a snippet of a larger piece and felt incomplete. Too bad it was such a let-down.

Well, where do I start? I would like to point out some erroneous statements by the first viewer commenting. He states that the introductory statement says it is "100% true" and "authentic". Actually, its says "true-to-life", which I would construe to be similar to today's films saying that the movie is "based on...". It states that the film is not biographical, but the incidents depicted did occur. We know from historical works that the Japanese were responsible for many atrocities in China, especially Manchuria...the giving of opium to the starving villagers, the bayoneting of infants and toddlers, the raping of Chinese women and the setting up of houses of prostitution to "service" the Japanese Army & so on. So as Hollywood has always done, they take real facts and fictionalized & personalized them to give them more impact. A statement by the previous commenter, about how all the major roles were played by white actors, while actors of Japanese heritage played lesser/support roles. Well, as far as I can tell by cast listing, there were no Japanese actors in the movie. Philip Ahn (Korean descent), Benson Fong and the other Asian actors are Chinese ancestry. J. Carroll Naish had played other Asian characters throughout his career. Tama was played by Mexican-American actress, Margo (married to Eddie Albert).Tom Neal makes a very strange Japanese, even for the time...For a propaganda film, it is more even handed in its portrayal of the Japanese characters and the upheaval in Japanese society then many war films of its day. There are two story strands, the brutalization of Taro, from a americanized frat boy to a murdering martinet and the humanizing of his father, Reo Seki, who comes to see the loss of son and his son's happiness in marriage to Tama, a farmer's daughter and the destruction of the rigid social order of his beloved country... The Russian is portrayed positively; the German a bit dismissively; and the three Americans (woman reporter, the male engineer, the baseball coach), are all different faces of American society: the brave American (the woman reporter); the status-quo American (the engineer) and the "ugly" American (the baseball coach).