Season Introduction & Shanghai Express (1932), Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention, BFI

 

Anna Wong, the actor’s niece, never met her aunt but she learned a lot from her father who assured her that his sister had felt fulfilled as she entered her final years after over 80 films and a legacy she must have been aware of by her death in 1961. Few stars have had to work as hard as Anna May Wong to keep working at a high level and, as the series title indicates, this involved a lot of reinvention and hard graft: learning how to dance when dancing was what was expected of you, learning to drop her American accent when in Britain on stage or on screen and learning to spot opportunities and making the sacrifices necessary to grab them. She was tough as well as everything else.

 

Anna was speaking as part of a panel of four providing an introduction for the season ahead with each bringing their own expertise and particular connection with the first Chinese American film star. Season curator Dr Xin Peng, Assistant Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Cambridge University was on hand along with Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll, the essential new biography on AMW which is out now in paperback and in the BFI shop ready for signature. The group were completed by Pamela Hutchinson film writer and historian with a particular interest in the silent era and in the women whose stories are less appreciated than they deserve to be silent film is a crusade all of its own but with Anna May, there are so many wrongs to right for us all.

 

The women took turns in introducing their favourite clips from the actress, starting with Piccadilly selected by Pamela, who chose the clip were the actress is working in the kitchen cleaning dishes but is caught dancing and promptly sacked by the club manager. He later, of course, realises his mistake and she becomes the club’s, and his, main attraction and, in some ways, this story mirrors Anna’s own journey from the sink to the stage and screen. Anna selected Pavement Butterfly for it allowing her aunt to show her range as well as her ability as a clothes horse and dancer – a natural even before training.

Pamela Hutchinson, Anna Wong, Katie Gee Salisbury and Dr Xin Peng

Katie picked another German film, Song, which again allowed Wong to show her “chops” as an actor in the scene in which she pretends to be her knife-throwing partner’s lover allowing the temporarily blinded man to believe she has come to see him – it’s so moving and we see in close-up Anna’s ability to cry on cue… who knows what sadness enabled her to summon tears so readily? By contrast, Xin chose a clip from the all-star review Elstree Calling, this being a parody of Taming of the Shrew, showing Anna’s finesse at pie-throwing whilst dressed in her Piccadilly costume.

 

After success in Europe Anna returned to a two-film contract with Paramount starting with Daughter of Shanghai (1931) as Fu Man Chu’s daughter and then, tonight’s main event, Shanghai Express (1932) in which, as we shall see, she makes the absolute most of her part even having to compete for screen attention alongside Dietrich. Sadly, her obvious strengths continued to be ignored by a Hollywood and US society in transition for want of a better word. She returned to Europe, not for the first or last time, as she continued to fight for her identity and her career.

 

As the panel showed with her later talkies, Wong may not always have had a leading role but she seems always to have made her roles leading and was a dynamic presence in each of the clips we saw no matter how much submerged in the constraints of cliché. She was a formidable woman; she was relentless and she made herself count. We shall learn a lot more over the next month or so.

 

Anna & Marlene...*

Shanghai Express (1932)

 

In her introduction, Katie Gee Salisbury asked for a show of hands for those who had seen our main feature and I was among the large minority who had not and it did not disappoint on the big screen. Marlene I know, von Sternberg too but this is one of those films for which the term “classic” was invented with the Austrian directing his light and shadow with swaggering invention and bringing out the best from his cast in one of the great train mysteries. Dietrich takes the breath away with her sorrowful wit and no one ever captured her fine features the way Josef did and his DOC, Lee Games who won the Academy Award. There’s a moment when she’s leaning against the wall of her compartment, allowing the rising smoke of her cigarette to twist and turn over her brightly lit face which gives us so little of what she’s thinking that we’re lost in the examination… all she asks is to be believed and we all have the faith by the end.

 

Alongside her are the chiselled and slightly stiff features of our own Clive Brook, his equally stilted sonorous voice redeemed by his character’s febrile confusion around Marlene’s Shanghai Lil. His upper lip couldn’t be any stiffer but underneath his professional cool, Captain Donald “Doc” Harvey is about as mad about the girl as he can be it’s been five years and four weeks when the two meet again on the Shanghai Express but he’s never stopped and neither has she… they just need to believe in each other.

 

How could anyone steal a scene in such circumstances, let alone provide some of the key moments of this film? Well, if you’re not familiar, it’s possible with the look, the physicality and purposeful delivery of Anna May Wong. As Pam said in the previous session, Anna knows how to handle the moments between dialogue, and she can make even solitaire look like a deadly game. Von Sternberg realised this and places her so often in the corner of his scenes, drawing our eye to her keen observation and intensity through the frame of carriage windows as characters move back and forth, shifting in importance and meaning.

 

The director choreographs both actresses very well but it’s Anna’s movements that are the most potent, she’s a woman of agency and, unlike so many other characters she played, she is not here to provide oriental adornment or be the tragic loss that foreshadows the central lovers. The chemistry between her and Dietrich also makes this a female buddy movie, they’re “coasters” making their living in the rich resorts along the south China coast but they also look after each other, see the same moves and instinctively act in tandem. Not so much Thelma and Louise as Butch and Sundance… with a 78-rpm portable turntable playing some high-energy jazz that buzzes them down as it imposes their presence on the other travellers.

 

The real chemistry is between the two women whatever Lil does with Doc, there’s something enabled by von Sternberg but created entirely by Marlene and Anna that you very rarely see in this era and it speaks to the strength and intelligence of both performers. They present more than can be possibly interpreted in one viewing, purposefully enigmatic and completely controlled and the only truly serious characters in a film featuring a clutch of lovely supporting caricatures. That’s not to say that these walking sub-plots are not all expertly worked from Eugene Pallet’s wonderfully raspy gambling man to Gustav von Seyffertitz’ grumbly German hypochondriac and Lawrence Grant’s perpetually outraged Reverend Carmichael. Then there’s Émile Chautard as the French Major with a sad secret, Louise Closser Hale as the English lady smuggling her nervous pooch and the familiar “yellow face” of Warner Oland, here a revolutionary and later the “Chinese detective” Charlie Chan.

Oland stands out in a film that aims for authenticity and there’s none more so than Anna May Wong who shows exactly how to make the most of every second of screen time. It’s a shame that Hollywood wouldn’t give her the chance to develop as a leading actor, especially in a decade in which white actors continued to play oriental roles in make-up**. America’s loss was Europe’s gain as we shall see as this celebration of her talent, determination and reinvention unfolds.

 

Full details of the season are here on the BFI website: do not miss this!!

  

Katie Gee Salisbury introduces in NFT1

*Nope... They worked well together but they were not together according to Katie Gee Salisbury and others. Ms Dietrich's liaisons were generally freely admitted and publicly documented.

**The Good Earth (1937) featured Paul Muni and Luise Rainer in Oscar-winning yellowface… Wong was considered for her role but Hays Code anti-miscegenation rules meant that Muni’s wife had to be played by another white person. Anna was offered another role but she refused saying: “You’re asking me – with Chinese blood – to do the only unsympathetic role in a picture featuring ab all-American cast portraying Chinese characters?” This quote is as per Kenneth Quan in his profile on the star on Asia Pacific Arts.

 

When Erich met Irving... Merry-Go-Round (1923), Flicker Alley Blu-ray

  

“…inexcusable and repeated acts of insubordination… extravagant ideas which you have been unwilling to sacrifice… and your apparent idea that you are greater and more powerful than the organization that employs you.”

Irving Thalberg’s letter of termination to Erich von Stroheim

I’d seen the new restoration of this film at last year’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone but sometimes in the rush of a festival you don’t always pick up everything about a film, especially one with such a complicated backstory as this. According to von Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski in his book-length audio commentary, Erich spent something like 33 days directing the film, 20-25% of the total according to the accounts of Universal’s new Head of Production, Irving Thalberg, who fired him and Rupert Julian who replaced him and yet this film could hardly be more “Von”.

 

Koszarski quotes from the meticulous diaries of James Winnard Hum who was sent to man-mark the Austrian spendthrift by Thalberg, a 24-year-old “Boy Wonder” who was busily turning Universal into a business with a command-and-control structure that was not going to co-exist with the old ways of director-led films. Thalberg had more to offer than just a belief in budgets and schedules but having already had to intervene on the director’s over-spent Foolish Wives (1922), when von Stroheim wanted to keep on shooting, was not going to allow him to risk Universal’s financial well-being not matter how “inspired” the ideas. Foolish Wives had been a smash but maybe studios will one day learn that Thalberg’s creative due diligence was a necessary counterbalance to unfettered and expensive creativity.

 

So, enter Mr Julian, a director badly in need of a hit and who would later claim more of the film’s ideas as his own than were his due. Koszarski reads out von Stroheim’s script outline during his commentary and it’s quite clear that not just the story but the shooting instructions were followed pretty faithfully with the result that the film, with most of the original cast and crew intact, carries the hallmarks of its author and original director.

 

This means a film that is marked by the harshness of certain characters and the cruel fate of others all against a backdrop of a fantasy Viennese noble demimonde that von Stroheim convinced everyone was his too. The extremes of the characters’ backgrounds makes the cruelty all the more painful as fairground organ grinder Agnes Urban (Mary Philbin) is forced to keep on playing just as her mother is breathing her last by her monstrous boss, Huber (George Siegmann). This is further contrasted with her soft-focus flirting with handsome Count Franz Maxmilian von Hohenegg (Norman Kerry) who has the luxury of visiting her incognito feigning to be a necktie salesman.

 

The Count’s life is unreal as a matter of course though, marked by duty and ritual that obscures feelings and curtails freedom. He is due to be married to the daughter of the Minister of War (Spottiswoode Aitken), the Countess Gisella von Steinbruck (Dorothy Wallace) in a decision Emperor Francis Joseph (Anton Vaverka) has decided is in everyone’s best interests. All of this is far from the carefree Count’s mind as he slums it in Vienna’s playground, the Prater amusement park, and seeks out its main attraction, the Merry-Go-Round.

 

The film opens with a mix of stock shots of Vienna showing the gothic history, the night life and the sordid underbelly as a young mother says goodbye to her son and throws herself off a bridge into the Danube. Then we join the Count as he shakes off a luxury hangover care of his manservants’ attentions including a risqué glimpse of the Kerry derriere which caused issues with the censors – more so, according to Koszarski, than the sexual violence later in the story. You can always count on the moral arbiters to miss the real point can’t you?

 

Life is so different for the workers at the Prater fairgrounds with Huber treating everyone, including his wife Marianka (the great Dale Fuller!), who he pointedly gives a tiny portion of his meal to, not to mention Agnes and her father Sylvester (Cesare Gravina who will later play alongside her in The Man Who Laughs) as they try to care for Ursula, his wife, her mother, who is in the last stages of serious illness.

 

The visit of the handsome stranger lifts Agnes spirits and, given the poverty of her life, the comparison with his true status is almost comical still wheel of fortune wheel of fire… the Merry-go-Round if life and just in case we’re not sure about the cyclical nature of fate and despair, every so often a silver0skinned devil appears laughing over a carousel spinning helplessly below.

 

The pathos is broad-brush but the finesse of the cruelty is such that this is merely another tragicomic aspect of the hopeless duality of love, life and grinding duty. I really don’t know exactly how socialist von Stroheim was but this critique of naked greed and careless class couldn’t be more on point for the times. He may be mourning a “lost Vienna” but not if it was this unfair.

 

And still comes the misery, Nicki (Charles King) is Agnes’ friend, and he loves her even though his deformity and humped back preclude her romantic interest – in his mind at least. He has an orangutang which is his livelihood, but also a friend who looks at Huber with savage eyes (no less than the rest of us). He watches in anguish as she falls for the handsome Franz as there is nothing he could or would do to stop it.

 

The greatest indignity of all awaits Agnes when, inevitably, the truth will out and she endures a humiliation in front of her “betters” and her father that is difficult to watch. This is as intended by von Stroheim but the director of 75-80% of the film deserves a lot of credit for largely taking script, cast and crew and making the film in the uncompromising fashion we identify with his predecessor.

 

There are also some very fine performances on screen and is this the best Mary Philbin role? She’s full on committed and never really crosses over the line towards purely melodramatic being believable sad and humiliated and in love all at the same time. Cesare Gravina is so intense and has just the face for this kind of gothic tale in which the cavernous depths of man’s everyday cruelty to man are ultimately compared with the First World War. Norman Kerry is, of course, a big lunk, but that’s what the role demands and many a better actor would struggle to complete his story arc… you have to see it!

 

The restoration features a newly commissioned orchestral score composed and conducted by Robert Israel, which contributes greatly to the emotional vibrancy of the cast and story and it’s a very rewarding watch and re-watch.

  

The restoration is fabulous and there’s an extra looking at it in more detail and much more:

 

·         Audio Commentary by Richard Koszarski - Go behind the scenes of the troubled production and explore Merry-Go-Round’s incredible filmic legacy with an in-depth commentary track from cinematic historian Richard Koszarski

·         Vienna Actualities - Explore Vienna in the years before World War I with 17 minutes of historical footage, courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria

·         Old Heidelberg (1915) - A new restoration of a feature from director John Emerson and producer D.W. Griffith, which served as an influence on Merry-Go-Round and also boasts Erich von Stroheim’s very first acting role

·         Restoring Merry-Go-Round - Go behind the scenes of the brand-new restoration with film restorer Serge Bromberg

·         Photo Galleries - Production stills, publicity, and other rare documentation

·         Souvenir Booklet - Featuring a new essay on the production by Richard Koszarski and notes on the restoration by Serge Bromberg and Lucie Fourmont

·         English SDH Subtitles

·         Reversible Cover Artwork – always a bonus!

 

Full details are available on the Flicker Alley website and those that re-sell US Blu-rays to the UK. It’s a fascinating part of the changing face of Hollywood as well as being one of Erich’s best concepts brought to life with a little help from his “friends” Rupert and Irving!