Review of The Geisha Boy

When I first watched an entire Jerry Lewis movie, it was Hardly Working 30 years ago. In that one, he impersonated a Japanese cook speaking in gibberish. I thought it was funny at the time and when I eventually see it again, I'll put my reaction here. But some other imitations of such nationality that I just watched on some of his earlier movies made me cringe since it reeked of such a racist stereotype. So when watching this one, The Geisha Boy, I was pleasantly surprised to see such a good portrayal of the people from the Land of the Rising Sun and that Lewis was minimal in trying to mimic them. He plays Gilbert Wooley, a down-on-his-luck magician reduced to going on a USO tour with movie star Lola Livingston (Marie McDonald). It goes to the Asian country where he meets and gets acquainted with a pretty young lady named Kima Sikita (Nobu Atsumi McCarthy) and her nephew Mitsuo Watanabe (Robert Hirano). Also on the plane is Sgt. Pearson (Suzanne Pleshette in her debut feature). Oh, and the father of Kima, played by Sessue Hayakawa, resembles someone from a certain movie...This is the second picture in a row directed by Frank Tashlin starring Jerry. As the former animator of Warner Bros. cartoons, Tashlin displays his cartoon talents immensely like when he uses the character of Ichiyama (Ryuzo Demura) when he's chasing Jerry and his rabbit Harry who also benefits from the director's treatment. While things are quite hilarious during the plane sequences and some of the Japan scenes, things become quite sentimental when Mitsuo becomes the focus. And that's not a bad thing here as Jer, as he also demonstrated in Tashlin's Rock-a-Bye Baby, knows how to switch gears naturally. So on that note, The Geisha Boy comes highly recommended. P.S. I have yet to watch The Bridge on the River Kwai but I read about Hayakawa's spoofing of that scene on Wikipedia so I knew about it when watching it here. I had also seen him as much younger man in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat so he wasn't too unfamiliar to me. And I was wonderfully amazed to read here on IMDb that Ms. McCarthy had twice played a romantic interest for Noriyuki "Pat" Morita: as his wife on "Happy Days" and as a long-ago love on The Karate Kid, Part II. Oh, and today would have been one when Jer would have hosted the MDA telethon except, for reasons known only to him and the MDA association, he's been unceremoniously dumped. It's a shame, really.