Main character energy… Java Head (1934)/Drifting (1923), BFI Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention

 

“That she is an exceptionally clever actress one cannot doubt. She may merely wander through a corner of the picture, but she’ll register a hit every time.”

H.C. “A Chinese Puzzle”, Pictures and Picturegoer, February, 1924¹

 

Two films made over a gap of eleven years which show how our hero did indeed reinvent herself to keep working. Season curator Xin Peng pointed out in her introduction for the second film that whilst featuring as a teen in films staring Colleen Moore, Priscilla Dean and Alla Nazimova, she enjoyed a longer career than any of them, transitioning into the talkies not just in English but German, French, Chinese and “The King’s English” required for her roles in British films especially when American became briefly unpopular. Priscilla’s last film was Klondike in 1932 at the grand old age of 36 and Colleen’s last was The Scarlet Letter (1934) when she was 35 and certainly in a position to do what ever she wanted, be it building a dolls house or investing her money wisely.

 

Wong did not have the luxury of being able to retire early and she was only just picking up steam in the early thirties when she found fame and some fortune outside of the USA, breaking barriers in the UK and Germany, learning stage craft and putting on shows in China and Australia. She was willing to learn, not just languages but also the dancing always expected of her and the diction required to conquer the microphone. And, what guts did it take to step on stage in 1929, alongside Laurence Olivier to perform The Circle of Chalk at the New Theatre in London?

Anna May Wong in Drifting

 

Drifting (1923) with John Sweeney

 

As Yiman Wang points out² Anna (AMW) was only ever a freelancer with no substantial contracts in the manner of these other stars and, of course, even at the time in Hollywood it was remarked upon by the industry observers how she was never given star roles, the most she could hope for was a secondary role she could and often did make her own. So it is with Drifting directed by her “mentor” and sometime partner³, Todd Browning, who was 43 to her 18… He had previously worked with her on Outside the Law (1921) when she was underage and he married yet infatuated by the “exotic” and – for him – “unusual” girl^4.

 

In addition to being “the most murdered actress in Hollywood”, Anna May Wong is arguably the greatest scene-stealer even when given stereotypical roles and predictable narratives. This film followed on from her first substantial role in The Toll of the Sea (1922) and was intended as a vehicle for Universal’s “queen of the lot”, Priscilla Dean who dominates the screen time but to limited effect in comparison with AMW, who, looking even younger than her age, shifts through her dramatic progressions with some force whilst Dean just looks angry most of the time which, given the confusions of the script, is not surprising.

 

Matt Moore and Priscilla Dean

The new white man is very guarded in his language – I don’t know, maybe he is not the mine chief he claims to be…

 

The story? Well… there’s something about a government agent Capt. Arthur Jarvis (Matt Moore) posing as an entrepreneur trying to re-open a mine which is somehow cover for his attempts to shut down the opium trade around Hang Chow, a village near the poppy fields run by the Jhanzi outlaws. In Shanghai, opium dealer Cassie Cook (Priscilla Dean) isn’t making much money out of the profession and as her best pal lies dope sick, she is forced to team up with the rascally Jules Repin (Wallace Beery wearing a devious beard) who persuades her they can get rich on the pickings in Hang Chow.

 

Here they team up with the scheming Dr Li (William V. Mong in horrific yellow face) who whilst being no relation to Dr Fu Manchu, is supposed to be the father of the fragrant Rose Li (Anna May Wong) no matter how unlikely this is based on appearance. Meanwhile Rose has fallen for the noble Captain Jarvis and spends hours watching him standing outside the mine talking to his reliably Irish assistant, Murphy (Yale graduate J. Farrell MacDonald who probably got his Gaelic nose busted playing college football…) about opening the mine and how the two of them will defeat the massed ranks of the Jhanzi.

 

As with Mary Pickford, Anna May Wong could cry on cue...

Cassie and Repin collude with Dr Li and the former goes undercover as a novelist aiming to find out more about Jarvis’ two-man army only to fall in love with him. This complicates things greatly as tensions mount and the Jhanzi attack bringing out the best and worst of everyone: will Cassie choose the money or the man and can Rose put love and life before her duty to her evil father?

 

Her performances appropriate and splinter the stereotypes, upending their objecthood with a critical and sardonic twist…⁵

 

It’s an enjoyably odd film not just because of Browning’s uneven style but also a story that is, as The New York Tribune observed, “incoherent” with a “disagreeable” lead character⁶ that made them root for AMW’s Rose and they’re not the only ones. Anna May and J. Farrell are the most sympathetic watch as well as the token lovable kid, Billy the son of civilising missionaries, played by child actor Bruce Guerin who, when he grew up, became a professional pianist accompanying Bob Hope and many others.

  

John Loder and Anna May Wong clinch...

Java Head (1934)

 

AMW was 28 when she made this film and she first worked with producer Basil Dean on the theatrical version of The Circle of Chalk (1929) after he had been impressed with her performance in Piccadilly. The play had mixed reviews with her appearance praised and her “Hollywood accent” roundly condemned by such as the Bystander: “… it comes as a shock… to listen to the harsh nasal twang emitted from a figure of ancient China…” and the Graphic quipping “With Anna May Wong talking so American that Anna May Twang might be an apter name” ⁷.

 

As she did tie and again, Anna treated this setback as a learning experience and by the time of Dean’s Java Head she had learned the King’s English with the same alacrity as she did German and other languages. The result if her near perfect diction and characterful pronunciation that was usually more associated with the Orient at this time. Directed by J. Walter Ruben, with uncredited assistance from Thorold Dickinson and young Carol Reed, Java Head tells a story that would not have been legally possible in the USA with Anna May not only headlining but seen to kiss her Caucasian co-star John Loder. This ground-breaking moment was acceptable in Great Britain as the characters were married but even this is not especially evidence that, as Cole Porter was to report in the same year, “anything goes…” as the film gives mixed messages on racial tolerance and cultural-romantic compatibility.

The family meet...

 

The film is based in Bristol and the fortunes of two merchant shipping families, the thrusting Ammidons and the failing Dunsacks led by two former friends who had fallen out over twenty years earlier following a tragedy at sea.  Lovable Edmund Gwenn plays Jeremy Ammidon who even nearing the age of retirement is still passionate about his business and sailing ships whilst his land-lubber son, William (the great Ralph Richards), feels they need to innovate with steam and the fast clipper ships as well as the types of cargo they carry. Youngest son, the dashing Captain Gerrit Ammidon (John Loder) is eager for adventure and has the familial sea legs.

Gerrit sparks the old feud by falling for the Nettie Vollar (Elizabeth Allan), the granddaughter of old man Barzil Dunsack (Herbert Lomas) who in addition to hating the Ammidons, loves God a lot and in addition has yet to forgive Nettie for being born out of wedlock, one of a number of sins unmentioned but implied in a story partly based on implied opium trading and addiction. Barzil’s faulty logic drives Gerrit to sea and he leaves to make his fortune trading around the World.

 

A year later he returns and he has brought his new wife with him, Taou Yuen (Anna May Wong) much to the distress of his family, and of course lonely Nettie. She may well be a princess but this cuts no rice with the locals for whom she is “a heathen Chinese! From China!” who causes outrage when she attends church among all but the priest who hopes to discuss the teachings of Confucius with her. She also gets a warm welcome from Barzil’s son and Nettie’s uncle, Edward Dunsack (George Curzon) who is seemingly as addicted to China as he is to opium although again this is implied with Gerrit having brought a mysterious chest from Shanghai for him.

AMW generates MCE at the church

As the family gradually accepts Taou Yuen she forms a bond with Laurel, the youngest Ammidon child (an uncredited but spirited performer) who dresses up in Chinese clothes and make-up entering the room just as Edward is harassing her aunt and in his opium-addled state capable of anything. This narrative is also capable of anything and pulls a 360 or two over the closing sequences as Gerrit falls back in love with Nettie and starts to question his marriage. So too does Taou Yuen in ways that I can’t really explain here… themes very much of their time.

 

In the after-screening Q&A, season curator Xin Peng pointed out that AMW was very keen to make the film and so the mixed outcome is a surprise but perhaps balanced by the more positive aspects of the film and the actor’s skill in presenting more than the script demands in terms of authentic character and feeling. Once again she rises above and subverts the surface narrative in ways we see more clearly now than most would in 1934.

 

The film was made in between AMW’s theatrical tours of Britain which demonstrate her relentless ability to conquer new territories and theatrical routes as she carved out an unique path across countries and cultural boundaries. A truly remarkable woman.

 

There is so much more to see and learn from this season and full details of Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention can be found on theBFI website. Do not miss out!

  

1.       As quoted by Yiman Wang in “To Be an Actress: Labour and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World”, University of California Press 2024

2.       Also, in “To Be an Actress…”

3.       According to David J. Skal and Elias Savada in The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre, Doubleday, 1995 as quoted in the BFI’s screening notes.

4.       Katie Gee Salisbury in Anna May Wong: Not Your China Doll, Faber 2024. When Browning’s wife discovered the liaison she left him.

5.       In “To Be an Actress…”

6.       David J. Skal and Elias Savada again.

7.       Katie Gee Salisbury in Anna May Wong

 

 

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.