Going native

[RogueMartian]

I got into a weird debate recently and was looking for lists of movies about people who leave their own cultures and join another one. Like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves or Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. If anyone knows of any other movies with that theme or at least that idea somewhere in it, can you post it?

[Rune]

I'm not sure whether you could you count Star Wars Anakin, or the Matrix's Neo but 2 that come to mind are Heaven and Earth (Le Ly goes from Vietnam to the USA) and Greystoke, Legend of Tarzan (from the jungle to Edwardian Britain).

Its too early in the day for me to think :p

[Kathy Kane]

There's a Man Called Horse with Richard Harris, it's about an Englishman who is adopted by native americans.
There's also two sequels, Return of a Man Called Horse and Trimphs of a Man Called Horse.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0066049/

[RogueMartian]

I'm not sure whether you could you count Star Wars Anakin, or the Matrix's Neo but 2 that come to mind are Heaven and Earth (Le Ly goes from Vietnam to the USA) and Greystoke, Legend of Tarzan (from the jungle to Edwardian Britain).

Its too early in the day for me to think :p
Those aren't quite what I had in mind. Not people leaving their home or changing, but people who abandon or feel detested by their own culture. For example in Dances With Wolves, Costner has no desire to ever return to his society. In the movie Jerimiah Johnson with Robert Redford, the guy abandons his life to become a mountain man. In The Last Samurai Tom Cruise joins the samurai rather than fighting with his own people. In all these movies, the guys end up hating or even fighting the culture they came from. That's sort of the idea I'm looking for.

[Chris Wood]

In the Bond film You Only Live Twice, Sean Connery undergoes cosmetic surgery to become Japanese.

[Kathy Kane]

In the Bond film You Only Live Twice, Sean Connery undergoes cosmetic surgery to become Japanese.
I saw some of that yesterday, I wondered what movie it was, cosmetic surgery?!

[Avery]

Possibly the Joy Luck Club, though it's been a long time since I've seen the film.

[Mynd Hed]

Well, I don't know if it really counts, but Gulliver wanted to be a horse (PLEASE don't make me try to remember how to spell the silly name from the book) in Gulliver's Travels, which has had at least one film adaptation that I know of.