Production
Playing the role of an Okinawan villager was to prove a challenge for Marlon Brando's method acting techniques. He spent two months studying local culture, speech and gestures and, for the actual shooting, he subjected himself daily to two hours of make-up applied to make him appear Asian. Even though Brando is supposed to be an interpreter fluent in the local language, he does little actual translating. This was presumably because to do so would require that Brando be fully and actually conversant in the local dialect. Also, the film never explains why in a rural Okinawan village, the spoken language is Japanese instead of the local Okinawan dialect. Of course, the average American filmgoer of the 1950s was not in a position to notice these cultural discrepancies, or to be aware of the actual history of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands.
The role of Colonel Wainwright Purdy III was to have been played by Louis Calhern, but he died in Nara during filming, and was replaced by Paul Ford. Ford had played the part more than a thousand times, having been one of the Broadway originals, and he would play a similarly bumbling, harassed colonel hundreds of times more in Phil Silvers' TV series Bilko.
The film made use of Japanese music recorded in Kyoto and sung and danced by Japanese artists. Machiko Kyo (Lotus Blossom) had won acclaim for her dramatic performances in Rashomon and Gate of Hell, so this lightly comedic part was a departure for her.
Read more about this topic: The Teahouse Of The August Moon (film)
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—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)