Thursday, August 12

Irony II

We saw the DVD of The Sand Pebbles (1966). It was interesting to see if we could recognize anything in Taiwan, where it was filmed. Some of the river scenes looked like Tamsui, but the director Robert Wise and the actors interviewed (Richard Crenna, Candice Bergen, and Mako) identified one setting as Tamsui one time and Keelung the other. Of course Candice Bergen in particular wanted to make it all about Vietnam. Despite big talk about what great friends everyone was, Mako was the only one to mention the actress who played the Chinese girl Maily, saying she kept to herself.

It turns out that she is Maryat Rollet Andriane (aka Emmanuelle Arsan), and had already written Emmanuelle as we see from this site, which shows her topless on a couple of book covers. Yep, if the gossip on the web is right, she's the Thai, possibly Eurasian, who married her husband, Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane (at one time Special representative of the Director of the International Council of Monuments and Sites of UNESCO) when she was sixteen, and later went on to create the Emmanuelle franchise. I guess her fellow actors were embarrassed by that or something else she did while they were filming in Taiwan. She didn't have much of a role, but she did OK with it.

If we can laugh at homosexual Rock Hudson playing the hetero love interest in the fifties movies, maybe we can laugh at the fact that even when she played the good girl, she got to show a little skin (when the baddies lifted her shirt, which showed her bra).

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