Come See The Paradise movie review (1991)
Another character in the film is an Irish-American who is a left-wing labor organizer. He gets involved in a stupid and illegal action against a movie theater chain, flees from the East Coast to the West Coast, and changes his name. But he cannot change his ideas, and after he gets a job in a fish cannery he is soon supporting the right of his fellow workers to strike. That means he, too, is not an "American" - at least not in the eyes of the company goons.
Although we make much of our tradition of freedom in this country, we are not so clever at understanding what freedom really means. Even our president, for example, cannot understand that among the rights symbolized by the American flag is the right to burn it - or honor it, if that is our choice. I have always wondered why the people who call themselves "American" most loudly are often the ones with the least understanding of the freedoms that word should represent.
When the country is threatened, our civil liberties are among the first casualties - as if we can fight the enemy by taking away our own freedoms before the enemy has a chance to. That is what happened in the early days of World War II, when a wave of racism swept the Japanese-Americans out of their homes and businesses, confiscated their savings and investments, and shipped them away in prison trains to concentration camps that were sometimes no more than barns and stables. Later on some of these same Japanese-Americans fought with valor in the same war, perhaps because they understood better than their captors what they were fighting for.
"Come See the Paradise" tells a story of this period in terms of a romance between the labor organizer and a young Japanese-American woman. Her name is Lily (Tamlyn Tomita), and she is the daughter of a businessman who runs a little chain of Japanese-language movie theaters. When the Irishman, Jack McGurn (Dennis Quaid), flees to San Francisco after getting in trouble in New York, he finds a job as a projectionist in one of the theaters, and then he meets the daughter and they fall in love with each other almost immediately. (On their first date, he leans across the table and asks to kiss her, and she gives permission. It's a sweet scene, reminiscent of some of the Hollywood movies being made at about the same time.) Lily's father, of course, opposes the marriage. Jack goes to confront him, in one of the movie's strongest scenes, and when the old man remains inflexible the two young people run away to get married out of state (marriages between members of different races were illegal in California at the time). In a scene that is gloriously romantic and highly improbable, they find themselves at someone else's wedding party, where they dance the night away.
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