The movie “Flower Drum Song” is a Rodger and Hammerstein musical based on a novel by the same name. It began as a play, which was hugely successful, but when the play was turned into a movie, it didn’t do so well in the box office.
Set in the early 1950s, our main character is Mei Li, a young woman who arrives in San Francisco with her father. They stowed away on a boat to arrive and have no legal documents, but they feel sure that when they reach their destination, everything will be just fine. Mei Li has entered into an arranged marriage with nightclub owner Sammy Fong, and he’ll take care of everything. But when they locate Sammy, he tells them that the marriage can’t proceed as planned – he has fallen in love with Linda Lo, his headlining showgirl. He tells Mei Li that he knows just the young man for her, and off they go to the home of Master Wang, a wealthy man who has a handsome, but shy son, Wang Ta.
Mei Li is immediately attracted to Wang Ta, but Wang Ta has a crush on Linda Lo. Apparently everyone’s in love with Linda and no one is in love with Mei Li! Eventually, though, Wang Ta finds out that Linda is the flirty headliner at Sammy’s club, and that’s just not respectable enough for his family. He ends up with Mei Li, finally coming around to the fact that she’s pretty cute too.
I liked this movie – and yet I didn’t. The musical numbers were far too long, and I felt we spent too much time on the Sammy/Linda storyline and not enough on Mei Li, even though the movie was (supposedly) about her. I also felt Wang Ta’s dramatic change of heart was a bit too dramatic – at least give us a couple more minutes to see his emotional transformation. On the other hand, it was fun to see how it all worked out in the end.
This film was not rated.
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