Madame Butterfly (1932)

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Sylvia Sidney and Cary Grant star in this iteration of Madame Butterfly, the shitty-ass story of a geisha who marries an American Navy officer who leaves her and never comes back. The concept, alone, makes me cringe. Granted, this may be excellent fodder for opera, but stripped of music and left as a bare-bones narrative, this Madame Butterfly is almost torturous for most of its run-time.

We’ll put aside the fact that Sylvia Sidney is a white American actor playing a Japanese woman. That kind of casting was permissible when the film was made, so I’m not holding that against it. In fact, Sidney does a pretty good job in the movie. And so does Cary Grant — in fact, his likability as an actor may be the only thing that kept me from turning the movie off.

The problem with the movie is that after twenty or thirty minutes, you know Grant is going to leave Sidney. And if you know anything at all about the story, you know the entire rest of the movie is Sidney sitting around waiting for him to return. I mean, years go by. To make matters worse, she even bears Grants god-forsaken child (that he doesn’t know about) and keeps telling the kid how wonderful it will be when his father finally comes home. Spoiler alert, but Grant does finally come back, but only to shit on this poor woman’s parade once and for all.

Again, maybe you can sing pretty about this shit, but without the heavy warbling, Madame Butterfly is just punishing — to the geisha and the audience.