Come See the Paradise

Set in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles at the end of the thirties. Jack McGurn, an Irish-American union organiser, meets Lily Kawamura, a Japanese-American woman working at a cinema. They are in a state where interracial marriage is illegal, so they go to another one to marry. After Pearl Harbor, Lily and her family are sent to the camps with a hundred and twenty thousand other people of Japanese descent. Jack is drafted. The family is broken apart and then splits again inside the camp. Alan Parker wrote and directed. Dennis Quaid plays Jack and Tamlyn Tomita plays Lily. It opened in December 1990 and collapsed: around 5 million dollars against a 17.5 million budget. The reviews split. Roger Ebert gave three stars out of four and read it as a warning about how fragile civil liberties are under wartime hysteria. The opposing view held that Parker's intentions and his facts were right and that he had still reduced a powerful story of institutional racism to an unforgivably dull film. Who it is for: anyone interested in the less-told parts of American history and in period drama. Who it is not for: viewers who want this told by Japanese Americans themselves. The film sees it through a white husband, and that choice was criticised at the time.