Trailer
Plot summary
Mei Li and her father, Doctor Li, leave Hong Kong for San Francisco, where they search Chinatown for Madam Fong. Mei Li has been promised to Madam Fong's son Sammy in an arranged marriage, but Sammy owns the Celestial Gardens nightclub and is involved with Linda Low, the leading showgirl there. Asking directions, Mei Li earns money singing a flower drum song, and the two arrive at the club during a performance. Sammy works to talk Mei Li out of the match and sends her to Master Wang's sister-in-law, Madame Liang. Madame Liang persuades Master Wang to let Mei Li fall in love in her own time with his eldest son, Wang Ta, and the Lis take rooms in the Wang household. Wang Ta is dazzled by Linda.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Cherylene Leeas Wang San's Youngest Friend (uncredited)
- B.J. Bakeras Linda Low (singing voice) (uncredited)
- Joan Swiftas Singer (uncredited)
- Jane Chungas Woman
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Flower Drum Song (1961)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Flower Drum Song was the first major Hollywood feature film to have a majority Asian-American cast in a contemporary Asian-American story, and it would be the last to do so for more than 30 years, until The Joy Luck Club in 1993.
- Author C.Y. Lee was torn between a film offer worth $50,000 that would take all rights, and Joseph Fields's stage offer of $3,000 that relinquished stage rights alone. He got drunk the night of the decision and could not remember which he had chosen, until his agent congratulated him the next morning.
- Although set in San Francisco, few scenes were actually filmed there. For the Twin Peaks scene neither Nancy Kwan nor James Shigeta went to the location: doubles stood in for the long shots of the car arriving and leaving, and their close-ups were process shots filmed at Universal Studios with the view projected on a screen behind them.
- According to David Henry Hwang, the song “Like a God” was dropped from the film because studio executives were worried that it could “offend audiences in the American South”.
- Anna May Wong had been scheduled to play the part of Madam Liang in Flower Drum Song, but she died in February 1961, before production on the film began.
- It has been asserted that Flower Drum Song was the only Hollywood adaptation of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical to lose money: the production rights were reported as costing $1 million and the budget as $4 million, while gross revenues have been reported as $10.7 million.
- The torch song “Love, Look Away”, sung on screen by Helen Chao (portrayed by Reiko Sato), was actually dubbed by the American opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was offered the job by Alfred Newman after her triumphant debut with the San Francisco Opera in Wozzeck.
