This post is for the Third Marathon Stars blogathon, hosted by The Wonderful World of Cinema, In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood, and Musings of a Classic Film Addict.
Anna May Wong was one of the first Asian-American movie stars. Born Liu Tsong Wong in 1905 to a San Francisco family of second-generation Chinese immigrants, she was an avid film fan as a child. Dreaming of stardom, she secured her first job as an extra in the 1919 Alla Nazimova film The Red Lantern. By the early 1920s, her name was known to film fans due to her distinctive screen presence and youthful beauty, but due to the racist attitudes of the time, Wong’s stardom was often stunted. Due to concerns about miscegenation, she could only kiss her leading man if he was the same race as she. Major roles she was perfect for often went to white actresses by default, even if the character in question was Asian. And often times the roles she did land were either small or stereotypical.
Wong has experienced something of a re-evaluation recently– she’s become the first Asian-American on US currency and several books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been published about her in the last few years– but she still isn’t universally known, even among classic film fans. When two fellow classic film fans I know in real life saw me reading a biography about her, they told me they’d never even heard her name. Some critics continue to disparage her as a “dragon lady” who took demeaning roles for a paycheck. Others see her as a trailblazer who fought as hard as she could for better onscreen representation of Chinese and Chinese-descended characters at a time when Hollywood felt no compulsion to offer such.
I’d been aware of Wong for years, though I never knew much about her life or work outside of a few key silent films. She often appears in movie magazines of the 1920s, presented as a madcap flapper in the latest fashions. For this marathon, I read biographical material on Wong while I went through my selected five films to give extra context to her work.
Okay, I do have a confession to make. The maximum number of films you’re allowed to have seen with your selected star is three. When I signed up, I could only come up with three films I knew I had seen with Wong: The Toll of the Sea, The Thief of Bagdad, and Shanghai Express. I felt this blogathon would be a great opportunity to see some Wong pictures that had been on my watchlist for a while now, like Piccadilly and Daughter of Shanghai. It wasn’t until I combed through Wong’s IMDB page weeks later– after watching three of the five prescribed films and reading an entire biography– that I realized she was also in the 1924 Peter Pan, Mr. Wu, and Old San Francisco, three movies I vaguely recall watching as a college undergrad. And by vaguely recall, I mean I only know I saw two out of three of them because they’re logged on my IMDB account. As for Peter Pan, apparently she was Tiger Lily in that (I don’t recall a thing about her performance there), but all I remember from that film was that Ernest Torrance was Captain Hook and that the Darlings’ dog Nana looked like a Cthulu-esque abomination.
Ahem. Anyway, even if I don’t meet the hard letter of the “3 films max” rule, I still say I fit the spirit. I can recall exactly three performances of Anna May Wong’s, no more than that. I may as well have had those other films erased from my memory, except for…
With that out of the way, here are the films I actually remembering seeing with Wong before the blogathon, as well as a brief overview of her life and career threaded throughout:
The Toll of the Sea was not Wong’s big break as a movie star (that would belong to the anthology film Bits of Life, where she played opposite Lon Chaney), but it is the film that cemented her fame. The second Technicolor feature film, the movie’s story is nothing special, just a retelling of the Madame Butterfly story set in China instead of Japan. If anything elevates it above being a mere historical curiosity, it’s Wong’s tender performance as a seduced and abandoned young woman.
Wong was still in her teens when she made this film, so her performance is not as polished as her later work. However, she is still sensitive and touching, emphasizing the tragedy of Lotus Blossom’s situation as a woman shunned by her own culture for pursuing a relationship with a white man and similarly rejected by the white Americans for her ethnicity. Wong’s girlishly humorous moments in the first half of the movie only throw the constant grief and pain of the latter part into harsher relief. (At the time, Wong’s crying scenes were considered noteworthy both among critics and in Hollywood. As it turned out, Wong was one of a select number of actors who could cry on cue.) In the end, Wong walks away with the film, an impressive feat considering how young she was.
Unfortunately, a leading role in one hit film did not mean Wong was suddenly going to be headlining tons of movies. Throughout the 1920s, her Hollywood career largely saw her in supporting parts, many of them steeped in orientalist stereotyping. The Thief of Bagdad is considered among her more memorable roles in this period, even if it’s a relatively minor one in the context of such a grand fantasy epic and is still stereotypical in nature. Wong plays a beautiful Mongolian slave girl in the Bagdad palace. While she is supposed to serve the princess, she conspires with the ambitious Mongolian prince (Sojin) to overthrow the Bagdad royals. It’s not much of a part and a lesser actress would have been overtaken by the character’s crazy costume and hairpieces, but Wong lends a playful sensual dimension to the role, particularly in a sequence where Fairbanks’ thief has a knife at her back. Wong’s response oscillates between fear and flirtation, using erotic charm to get herself out of the situation, not realizing Fairbanks has already left the room.
Throughout the mid-1920s, Wong continued to act, though the roles weren’t getting any better. In the late 1920s, Wong grew weary of the situation and leapt across the Atlantic to seek better opportunities in Europe. Black Americans like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson had done the same, finding less racial barriers abroad. Like Robeson, Wong mostly worked in England after a brief stint in Germany. When the talkie revolution swept through the movie industry, Wong worked on her vocal delivery and was able to make the transition with little trouble. In the early 1930s, more famous than ever due to her European journey, Wong decided to give Hollywood another go. She landed a contract with Paramount.
One of the better roles she got during this period was the prostitute Hui-Fei in Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 potboiler Shanghai Express. Having rewatched the film recently, I have two conclusions: 1) this movie is absolutely style over substance and 2) Wong walks away with the entire thing. The actual main storyline about Marlene Dietrich’s Shanghai Lily and her devotion to the stuffy nitwit doctor played by Clive Brook is melodramatic boilerplate only elevated to classic status by Dietrich’s charisma and the smoky, glamorous atmosphere of Von Sternberg’s direction.
Of all the characters, Wong’s is the only one who measures up to Dietrich in any way. The two women play off one another well due to a shared sense of cynicism towards a world that looks down on them as “fallen women.” However, just as Lily’s self-sacrificial love for Dr. Harvey reveals nobility beneath her “bad girl” persona, Hui-Fei displays similar hidden depths. She has her own sense of honor and obligation, viewing the Eurasian rebel leader Henry Chang played by Warner Oland as a menace to her country (“The government has offered a price of 20,000 for his capture – alive or dead. It will be a great day for China when that price is paid.”) and ultimately killing him after he rapes her. When Lily thanks her– Chang was going to force Lily to become his mistress in exchange for her beloved’s life– Hui-Fei makes it clear she didn’t kill Chang for Lily’s sake, but for her own.
Unfortunately, Hollywood continued to be stingy with good roles for Wong. The greatest heartbreak of her career was being rejected for the role of O-lan in MGM’s The Good Earth, an adaptation of the Pearl Buck novel of the same name. The tale of the hard lives of Chinese farmers, this was a film that largely treated the Chinese with sympathy, yet the major roles were claimed by white actors. Wong was refused the part because her leading man would be Paul Muni (a Jewish actor who initially quipped “I’m about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover” when offered the role) and the Production Code forbade actors of different races from kissing on-screen. Luise Rainer got the role instead.
Wong largely worked in B-pictures as the decade wore on. In the late 1930s, she visited China, a longtime dream of hers. However, she was shocked when her reception in China was rather cool, sometimes even hostile. Chinese critics felt Wong was a disgrace, taking on stereotypical and sexualized roles that made Chinese womanhood appear loose and wicked. Wong understood the criticism– she shared it herself– but it still stung, especially since she often fought for better representation of Chinese and Chinese-American characters in Hollywood projects.
During World War II, Wong appeared in propaganda films showing the Chinese in a heroic light and did all she could to support the war effort, but her stardom was on the wane. When her Paramount contract lapsed, it was not renewed and she was stuck making films for poverty row studios. Still, Wong worked hard and donated her salary to organizations like United China Relief.
In the immediate postwar period, Wong stopped working in the movies for a few years. She converted her home into a series of apartments for rent. She returned to film in 1949, appearing in a small role in the movie Impact. Throughout the 1950s, she worked in television. This work was initially promising: Wong got the lead in her own series, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first TV program to feature an Asian-American protagonist. A mystery show, it lasted only ten episodes before cancellation. Like much early television, the program is now lost. For the rest of the decade, she had to settle for supporting parts.
Wong was unfortunately an alcoholic in her later life and this contributed to her early death of a heart attack at age 56. What makes her ultimate end so tragic is that she may have been on the verge of a comeback. She was offered the role of Madame Liang in the film version of Flower Drum Song, but had to decline due to her poor health.
My general impression of Wong from the above three films and my reading about her life is that she was a beautiful actress with great presence too often under-served by the material she was given. For my five films, I tried to select films from a variety of genres, as well as from different phases of her career in order to get a fuller picture of her talents and screen image.
Daughter of Shanghai (dir. Robert Florey, 1937)
When antiques dealer Mr. Lang (John Patterson) refuses to aid a human smuggling ring, he and his daughter Lan Ying Lin (Wong) end up kidnapped by the villains. They shoot Lang dead, but Lan Ying Lin manages to escape. Swearing justice for her father’s death, she goes undercover to track down the smugglers’ leader, disguising herself as a dancer to infiltrate a dive on a Central American island. She crosses paths with Kim Lee (Philip Ahn), a G-man also on the trail of the criminal gang. The two become reluctant allies, all the while never suspecting the ringleader– and the one who most wants to see them dead– might be someone they know and trust…
By the late 1930s, Wong was mostly relegated to B-movies. While lacking the clout of A-pictures, some of my favorite movies from the classic period are B-productions as they often had more freedom to experiment or portray things you wouldn’t see in a more expensive movie that needed to be “safe” in order to return the hefty investment. Daughter of Shanghai is one of the most enjoyable B-movies you’re likely to find, not just for its delightfully pulpy narrative but also for its progressive depiction of Asian-Americans as heroes.
Wong plays a true badass in this movie. She’s smart, she’s independent, and she doesn’t take anyone’s crap. Wong herself was reportedly delighted with the role, happy to play a Chinese-American who wasn’t treacherous or shady, but openly noble and brave. She makes a great team with Philip Ahn’s G-man, and it’s also great to see her allowed to have a romantic relationship with another character that doesn’t end in misery and/or death.
The film itself is a delightful ride with all the pulp trimmings: near-death situations, last-minute escapes, dangerous traveling conditions, fistfights. The story is almost paced like a condensed movie serial and it’s never dull. Robert Florey was in the director’s chair, so there’s style to burn. Interestingly, though this film was made while the Production Code was in full force, it often has the feel of a pre-code melodrama due to its emphasis on seduction and potent danger.
There’s no denying this film is a low budget affair. Shot in a month, it’s hardly a Von Sternberg arthouse object. I don’t care. This movie is a hell of a lot of fun and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a great evening watch when they want to be entertained but don’t have two hours to burn. There are lengthy, expensive Netflix series which don’t have the entertainment value this thing does.
Daughter of the Dragon (dir. Lloyd Corrigan, 1931)
Exotic dancer Princess Ling Moy (Wong) discovers her long-lost father is none other than the notorious Fu Manchu (Warner Oland). Before they have time to do any normal father-daughter bonding activities, he is mortally wounded while killing his nemesis, Sir John Petrie, who he wrongly believes was responsible for the death of his family during the Boxer Rebellion. As he lies dying, Fu Manchu makes Ling Moy promise to kill the rest of the Petrie clan as revenge for their own slaughtered loved ones. Ling Moy swears to fulfill her father’s last request, but her quest for revenge will be complicated by her burgeoning romantic feelings for Petrie’s son Ronald (Bramwell Fletcher) and the efforts of Chinese detective Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa).
Daughter of the Dragon was Wong’s first movie under her Paramount contract. In terms of Asian representation, Daughter of the Dragon is the polar opposite of Daughter of Shanghai. This earlier film is far more negative, depicting Ling Moy as a seductress out to snap up clueless white men and murder/mutilate any love rivals without mercy. I cannot imagine Wong was too happy with this film, considering her dismay at the continued Hollywood-approved stereotyping of Chinese people as wicked deceivers.
Admittedly, the film does have camp value, not unlike the similarly orientalist The Mask of Fu Manchu with Boris Karloff. The production is dripping with over the top Chinese-inspired design and Ling Moy’s costumes are eye-catching. It’s clear the film’s main purpose is not exploration of character or theme, but providing the audience with vicarious thrills and chills as our “heroes” (I cannot put enough quotes around that word, since the so-called good guys are universally boring and mostly passive– also I do not get why Ling Moy is so into Ronald, he’s about as sexy as soggy fish and chips) evade gruesome yet creative death traps. This is certainly a case where the bad guys steal the show, simply because they have so much more drive and seem to be having so much more fun.
The best I can say about Daughter of the Dragon is that it never drags and Wong never phones it in, though the material is undeniably beneath her. Wong is able to give her character fleeting glimmers of melancholy. You get the sense Ling Moy’s wanted a father figure all her life and once she’s given one, she dedicates herself to pleasing him to fill that void– even if pleasing him means committing multiple murders. This makes Ling Moy a bit more human than she likely was on paper, but it’s not enough to really combat the nonsense in the script or to magically make the movie good. I can’t say I recommend it, but it has its moments in a so bad it’s funny kind of way.
Lady from Chungking (dir. William Nigh, 1942)
Kwan Mei (Wong) is the leader of a band of Chinese freedom fighters. Surrounded by the occupying Japanese on all sides, they bide their time in a peasant village. One day, a pair of American pilots are shot down near the village and captured by the Japanese. Seeing potential allies, Kwan Mei plans to rescue them as well as gather information about the plans of the invaders. Learning the Japanese leader General Kaimura (Hans Huber) has a taste for refined women, Kwan Mei poses as an aristocrat sympathetic to the occupiers in order to seduce any big plans out of him. Will she succeed?
During World War II, Wong was ardent about supporting the war effort, particularly through sending aid to the Chinese through organizations like United China Relief, participating in USO entertainments, and of course appearing in Allied propaganda. However, these films were for Producers Releasing Corporation, a poverty row studio. This effectively marked the beginning of the end of her movie career. The silver lining is that Wong got to play heroic figures.
While it’s no Casablanca, Lady from Chungking is a solid programmer, though nothing especially memorable. The comic relief is unbearably corny, such as when one of the American pilots narrates a baseball game in his sleep, much to Kwan Mei’s confusion. Characters are mostly underdeveloped and the story moves swiftly, which works for the movie’s adventure/thriller elements but less so for the interesting tensions that are left unexplored. General Kamimura is a fervent classist, sneering at the Chinese peasants and only taking an interested in aristocratic women as his bedmates. He loses all interest in Mae Clarke’s Russian opportunist when she reveals she is not a noblewoman in exile, but all but jumps onto Kwan Mei when she passes herself as a Chinese aristocrat. Playing on the general’s fantasies and sense of cultural superiority, Kwan Mei is able to charm information out of him, but this sexual entanglement also puts her at odds with her own people, who begin to wonder if Kwan Mei’s loyalty can be cancelled out by the luxury of being a Japanese officer’s mistress.
None of this goes anywhere interesting, but at only an hour, the film never overstays its welcome and Wong commands the screen easily. She cuts a noble figure and even gets an inspirational speech at the end. Her character is not a damsel needing to be rescued by the brave Americans, but an active heroine in her own right, as are the other Chinese characters. Plus, it’s always great to see Mae Clarke, another actress who deserved a better career than what she ultimately received.
When Were You Born (dir. William McGann, 1938)
Astrology expert Mei Lee Ling (Wong) finds herself flocked to during an ocean liner trip to San Francisco. Passengers react to her character readings and predictions with amazement and skepticism, but no one expects her most sensational prediction to come true: that one of the passengers will be dead within two days. When the very man turns up dead in that time frame, Mei is approached by the police. They suspect her, but instead she offers her aid in sniffing out the real culprit by using her knowledge of astrological signs.
When Were You Born was intended to be the start of a mystery film series starring Anna May Wong as a Zodiac expert who solves crimes by analyzing suspects based on their astrological sign. This would not come to be as the film didn’t make much of an impact. As much as I have come to love Wong during this marathon, I can see why the series never panned out, because this movie milks its gimmick dry before the slim runtime even ticks down. Much of the film is just Wong explaining everyone’s Zodiac sign and then telling the cops why this or that person did or didn’t do this or that crime because of that sign. The only things that held my interest was Wong’s lovely wardrobe and poised manner.
I don’t really have too much to say about this film. The camerawork is rote, the characters are one-dimensional, and it doesn’t help that I’m not that fond of mysteries as a genre. However, perusing reviews, I noticed that people who are into astrology tend to think this is a cute trifle, so your mileage will definitely vary.
Piccadilly (dir. E.A. Dupont, 1929)
London nightclub owner Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas) has a bit of a dilemma. His biggest draw is the dance team Mabel and Vic. The problem is that Vic has been harassing Mabel (Gilda Gray) to extend their partnership into the romantic realm, despite her constant rebuffs and entanglement with Wilmot. Called out for his unprofessional conduct, Vic quits before he can be fired. Mabel tries to go solo but Vic was the more popular of the two, meaning Wilmot needs a new act to reel customers back in. Enter Shosho (Wong), a young scullery maid with dreams of dancing. Her eastern-inspired act is a hit, cementing Mabel’s fall from grace. When it looks as though Shosho has a grip on Wilmot’s affections as well, Mabel becomes desperate. However, she finds Shosho is unwilling to give up her hard-earned fame and romance.
Modern consensus is that Piccadilly features Anna May Wong’s finest performance. Her final silent film, it is a great showcase for how technically dazzling late-period silents were. Though the top-billed star is Gilda Gray, the film is Wong’s show all the way.
On paper, the plot of Piccadilly is basic backstage melodrama: an older woman (and by “older,” I mean just past the impossibly ancient age of 25– Gilda Gray was in her late twenties when filming this, though she was made to look a bit older) with a waning showbiz career contends with a hot young thing looking to take her place in the limelight. However, the characters are given more depth than you’d expect and there are no clear-cut heroes or villains. Mabel’s career is threatened by ageist attitudes and the fickle tastes of her public while Shosho is up against rampant racism. Both women are sympathetic, and both are capable of pettiness and cruelty.
Shosho’s situation is handled with great delicacy. A less inspired movie would have made her a simple femme fatale, but Piccadilly emphasizes that Shosho is not a cold-hearted villainess but a young woman from a lower class background who craves luxury and excitement. Her introduction is one of the most brilliant quick-sketches of a character I’ve ever seen. Shosho dances slowly and sensually atop a table, mesmerizing her fellow scullery workers. When the camera lingers on her legs, we see her tattered stockings. This shot is not merely erotic, but also a keen insight into how dance is a brief escape from Shosho’s dreary everyday life. For a moment, she can transcend being a dishwasher. When she finally makes it big as a dancer and rapturously reads the positive reviews in the newspaper, Wong makes Shosho’s girlish delight so palpable that it’s impossible not to empathize with her.
Of course, Shosho is not a saint. As evidenced by her interactions with Mabel, she can be catty. She also strings along her boyfriend Jim (King Hou Chang), expecting him to be content with taking a backseat while she pursues a relationship with another man. Though she does seem genuinely fond of him, she certainly takes his loyalty for granted and is not above emasculating him, such as when she demands he model her skimpy dancer’s costume for Wilmont.
Shosho’s youthful beauty and appeal to the white British audience’s taste for the “exotic” is able to propel her to fame, but her ethnicity still provides roadblocks. Shosho and Wilmot share a mutual attraction, but dare not make their romance public. The two see a racially mixed couple shamed at a bar, a foretaste of what could happen to them should they take a chance on their relationship. Shosho’s dismayed reaction to the fiasco shows her interest in Wilmont is not merely that of a gold-digger.
Overall, Piccadilly is a fantastic film, almost a proto-noir with its shadowy aesthetic and complicated morality. The ironic ending is particularly a punch to the gut. If you’ve never seen a silent film before or if you’ve only seen silent comedy and want to dip your toes into silent drama, this is a great gateway title. But even more so, it’s a great gateway to Wong’s dramatic skills.
Conclusion:
After this marathon, I came away with greater respect for Wong, both as an actress and as a person. Hollywood truly did this woman dirty. She could handle drama and comedy with ease. She had a lovely speaking voice. She had great command of her body and an expressive face. Top all that with her undeniable beauty and it’s a crime she was not offered the same opportunities as white actresses of similar caliber.
Of the five movies I marathoned, my favorite was probably Daughter of Shanghai due to Wong playing a badass who doesn’t have to die tragically and just the overall pulpy vibe of the film. Piccadilly is a close second with its noirish intrigue and complicated characters. Lady from Chungking is pretty good for what it is, while When Were You Born is forgettable and Daughter of the Dragon is a tough sell unless you’re looking for something to give the MST3K treatment.
Despite the limits the film industry imposed upon her, Wong took nothing lying down. I admire her for her steadfastness in fighting for better, less demeaning roles, even if she did not win every battle. She was often the high point of many a film and deserves her rediscovery.
Sources:
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend by Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Backwards and in Heels: The past, present, and future of women working in film by Alicia Malone
Piccadilly audio commentary by Farran Smith Nehme
nitrateglow 
