DVD Review: “My Geisha”

Pleasant comedy has oh-so-French Montand as a movie director married to MacLaine, a superstar American actress. They’ve always worked together, but now Montand wants to strike out on his own with an on-location movie version of the opera Madame Butterfly. MacLaine and Eddie G., a producer, cook up a scheme to get her in the movie after all…you can probably guess the rest. Love That Bob Cummings is on hand as a lecherous actor. Beautiful photography and art direction in the Japanese sequences (no surprise, since director Cardiff was first an award-winning cinematographer and early expert in color film). This is one of those movies where the off-set antics were just as interesting: MacLaine and Montand carried on a well-publicized romance, and MacLaine’s husband Steve Parker, the executive producer on the project, was already separated from his famous wife and living in Japan. Guess that’s showbiz.