General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Come See the Paradise

Come See the Paradise is a 1990 American drama film, written and directed by Alan Parker, that follows an interracial marriage between an Irish-American union organizer and a Japanese-American woman, and the forced internment of her family after the attack on Pearl Harbor¹^•². It stars Dennis Quaid as Jack McGurn, Tamlyn Tomita as Lily Kawamura, and Sab Shimono as her father Hiroshi¹.

Key fact	Detail
Release	Cannes screening 13 May 1990; Los Angeles premiere 17 Dec 1990; opened in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York 23 Dec 1990; wide release 18 Jan 1991¹
Format	R-rated drama and romance, 133 minutes, Dolby Stereo¹
Key crew	Producer Robert F. Colesberry; cinematographer Michael Seresin; editor Gerry Hambling; music by Randy Edelman¹^•³
Production companies	Lilico Pictures and Dirty Hands Productions, released by Twentieth Century Fox¹
Budget	$17.5 (million), which Parker attributed partly to filming on an "architecturally accurate street" in Portland's former Japanese neighborhood⁴
Domestic gross	$865,660 at the United States box office⁵
Critical score	64% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 11 reviews⁶

Spoilers

Story

The film opens in 1936 in Brooklyn, New York, where Jack McGurn, a projectionist and union organizer, sets off a smoke bomb in a theater but breaks with his fellow unionists when they ignite a fire bomb that endangers patrons¹^•⁷. He flees to Los Angeles and takes a job as a projectionist at a Little Tokyo movie theater owned by Hiroshi Kawamura⁸.

Jack falls in love with Hiroshi's daughter Lily. Her father opposes the match, and California law at the time prevented mixed-race couples from obtaining a marriage license, so the two elope to Seattle, where they marry and have a daughter, Mini⁸^•⁹. The marriage strains when Jack resumes union activity, and Lily returns to Los Angeles with Mini shortly before Pearl Harbor⁸.

After the United States enters World War II, the Kawamura family is sent, along with other Americans of Japanese descent in California, to an internment camp; Lily's father is first detained by the FBI over his involvement in Japanese cultural societies⁸^•⁹. Jack, ironically, is drafted into the Army, goes AWOL, and searches California for his wife and daughter⁶^•⁸. Much of the story is told as a flashback, with the adult Lily recounting the events to her young daughter after the war³.

Production

Origins. Parker, who had just finished Mississippi Burning in Los Angeles, had long kept a Dorothea Lange photograph on his wall showing an elderly Japanese man with his two grandchildren in San Francisco in 1941, awaiting deportation and internment. A conversation with his producer Robert Colesberry about that photograph and the possibility of a film on the internment of Japanese Americans brought the project together¹⁰. Parker read more than fifty books and other research materials over two months and completed the first draft of the screenplay by the end of January 1989¹⁰. Twentieth Century Fox responded enthusiastically to the script¹⁰.

Casting. The casting process lasted six months and took open calls to cities with large Asian American populations, including San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, and Hawaii, with the search extending to Tokyo; Parker reported reading with over two thousand possibilities¹⁰. Studio documents in the AMPAS library state that Parker interviewed 3,000 Japanese Americans during casting and sometimes used details of their conversations to improve the film's texture⁴. Tamlyn Tomita, born in Okinawa and raised in Los Angeles, was chosen for Lily after testing with Dennis Quaid⁹^•¹⁰.

Locations. Principal photography began in Oregon in August 1989¹⁰. To recreate Los Angeles's Little Tokyo, Parker used a former Japanese neighborhood in old downtown Portland called "J-Town," whose accurate period street required little art direction and helped keep the budget low⁴. After filming in Portland from 1 August into September 1989, the production moved to Astoria, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and the Mojave Desert outside Palmdale, California, where the crew built an internment camp⁴. A racetrack set at Portland Meadows stood in for the "assembly centers" at Santa Anita Racetrack outside Los Angeles and Tanforan Racetrack in San Francisco, where Japanese Americans were temporarily held in May 1942 before the permanent relocation camps were built¹⁰.

The film also incorporated uncredited scenes from two earlier Fox pictures, Under Two Flags (1936) with Ronald Colman and Claudette Colbert, and Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (1938) starring Peter Lorre⁴.

Release and reception

Come See the Paradise screened on 13 May 1990 at the 43rd Cannes Film Festival, where a Los Angeles Times report described the only debate prompted by the premiere as whether Parker had "gone soft" compared with his earlier work; Parker himself called the film "much softer in attitude" than his earlier films¹^•¹¹. Before the American opening, Parker told the Los Angeles Times that it mattered to him that Japanese Americans enjoy the film: "Not a day went by that I didn't agonize that I got it right"¹².

Reception was mixed. Roger Ebert, the longtime film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times and winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, gave the film three stars and wrote that it was "a fable to remind us of how easily we can surrender our liberties, and how much we need them"³. Ebert acknowledged the common criticism that a white character provides the audience's point of view in a minority story, but argued that Parker's addition of the Quaid character let the film show how rights were denied for both racial and political reasons³.

Other reviewers were less favorable. David Ansen of Newsweek wrote that Parker had "succeeded in reducing a powerful story of institutional racism into an unforgivably dull film"¹³. Rita Kempley of The Washington Post called the film a placid portrait that "suffers from divided sympathies" between the Kawamura family and Jack's storyline⁹. A retrospective survey of contemporary reviews concluded that most reviewers agreed Parker did not do history justice, finding the love story overlong relative to the internment material, while still judging the film historically accurate in retelling actual events of the internment years¹⁴.

Box office. The film grossed $865,660 domestically, all of it in the United States⁵. The Pacific Citizen, a Japanese American community newspaper, argued that competent Japanese American actors in front of the camera could not compensate for the absence of Japanese American perspectives behind it¹⁵.

Place among internment films

The film belongs to a small group of mainstream American features on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. A 2019 TIME history of screen depictions of the camps grouped it with Midway (1976) and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) as films in which a white male lead appears as a "noble-hearted savior" beside a Japanese-American lover, a pattern that Japanese-American scholars such as Renee Tajima-Peña, a filmmaker and professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA, criticized for its sexualized framing of Asian-American women¹⁶. An educational study of the film notes that it remains useful for teaching the history of the internment policy and questions of intercultural relations raised by the love story¹⁷.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026