Word: vidor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...McKinney was just 16 when she was cast as Chick, a calculating floozy, in King Vidor's 1929 "Hallelujah." With baby fat maturing into a soft voluptuousness, she radiates an uncut sexuality rarely seen in black or white actresses then, or for decades thereafter. Her volcanic rendition of Irving Berlin's "Swanee Shuffle" (using exactly the leg and hip moves that would make Elvis Presley a star) quickly lures Zekiel, a naive sharecropper, into her arms and, just as quickly, into a loaded dice game run by her no-good lover. Chick then gets religion and makes a stab...
...well as a popular singer. Faced with postwar treason charges and possible execution, she revealed her Japanese ancestry and was deported. But Yamaguchi's charisma soon overcame her "crimes." In the '50s she made films in Hong Kong (Bu Wancang's The Unforgettable Night) and the U.S. (King Vidor's Japanese War Bride and Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo) as well as in Japan (Kurosawa's Scandal). Later she was elected to several terms as a Liberal Democrat to Japan's parliament. Pretty dramatic, eh? No wonder her life story inspired a Tokyo musical. (So did Hayakawa...