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Gwendolen Terasaki lived an extraordinary life in the 1930s and 1940s: Visiting Washington, D.C., from her native Tennessee in 1935, she met and fell in love with a Japanese diplomat, Hidenari "Terry" Terasaki. After the U.S. entered World War II, she and her young daughter followed Terasaki to Japan, where they lived for the duration while Terasaki was hounded by the government for his antiwar views. It's a story that hardly needs to be overdramatized. That Bridge to the Sun does so can't take away from the wonder of watching it unfold: What would I have done in that situation? What made a young woman from Tennessee fall so deeply in love with a Japanese diplomat? What must it have felt like, for both of them? Though Gwen (Carroll Baker) comes through the privations of wartime Japan with her movie-star looks strangely intact, the film doesn't spare us images of the hatred on both sides. One sequence takes them from a crowd shouting at their bus and hanging Tojo in effigy as they evacuate the Japanese Embassy to a Tokyo parade where Roosevelt and Churchill are the ones hanging. Gwen and Terry (James Shigeta) stand on the sidelines of that parade in trenchcoats, looking like secret agents hiding the complicated truths of their lives, and at the same time like time travelers from a post-Sixties world where virtue lies in exploring other cultures and decrying racism. As strange as their situation seems in that particular setting, at some level it's familiar to many people today: needing to choose one country over another to live in, relying on international media to keep up with a homeland, trying to make a child familiar with two cultures. All this shines through the MGM hokum thanks to a sometimes quite funny script co-written by Gwen Terasaki herself, based on her autobiography, and generally strong performances by both Shigeta and Baker. Shigeta shows particularly good range, going from sweet and sly to stern and unyielding.