Since the making of Rogers & Hammerstien's The King and I ten years after this production, it has been difficult not to compare the two, especially as the later glossy cinema-scope musical version is virtually identical in all but the songs. The performance of Rex Harrison is actually rather good for a white man daubed with boot polish on his face, but of all the cast it is Lee J. Cobb (as the Prime Minister to the King) who stands out, so I am not sure why Gale Sondergaard (Tip Tem) was nominated for an Oscar rather than he. The production design and photography is excellent and fully deserves the Oscar awards. There is the usual Americanisation of a British story, thus devaluing its quality. Irene Dunn is an American actress playing an English rose, she tries hard, but she is not Deborah Kerr, and her "son" is totally American, no vestige of an English accent at all! What also spoils the believability of the story (which is loosely based upon exaggerated fact) is English porcelain clearly spelling Honour as Honor! Also, the King's obsession with the American Civil war and Abraham Lincoln is baffling when you consider that this story is set in a time when the divided American States were engrossed fighting amongst themselves, whilst Great Britain was the most powerful nation on earth and the British Empire at its height. The difference between a good film and an excellent film is in the detail, accuracy, respect to race and its believability this could have been an excellent film had such an English story not been Americanised quite so clumsily.
Review of Anna and the King of Siam
