When Were You Born (Warner Bros./First National, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 I ran my husband Charles a quite intriguing movie from Warner Bros.’ “B” unit ini 1938 called When Were You Born. Note that the original title does not have a question mark at the end, and indeed the poster art for the film has the other letters in white against a color background but the word “YOU” in bright red letters, so the title actually comes off as When Were YOU Born. It was the brainchild of a man named Manly P. Hall (though the people who did the movie’s credits seemed unsure whether or not his first name had an “e” in it; it’s “Manley Hall” on the credit for the film’s original story and “Manly” in the printed foreword to a prologue of Hall introducing the 12 signs of the Western zodiac), who was essentially a New Ager before New Age was a “thing.” In 1928 Hall published a book with the very New Age-y title The Secret Teachings of All Ages, and for the next two decades or so he became a sort of New Age celebrity, claiming expertise in hypnotism and psychic phenomena in general as well as astrology.

The story he came up with for this film (though another writer, Anthony Coldewey, gets credit for turning Hall’s story into an actual script) concerns a Chinese astrologer, Mel Lei Ming (Anna May Wong, using her superb and underrated acting skills to liven up an otherwise pretty boring movie), who’s depicted as having almost uncanny powers just from doing people’s charts and deducing from them their personal characteristics. I was a bit perplexed that Ming was depicted as using Western astrology instead of the quite different Chinese version – especially since Wong, though Chinese-American in real life, was using the thick accent she did when she played a native Chinese – and I was also hoping for an explanation that Ming was actually doing Sherlock Holmes-style deductions about the other characters and merely pretending she was getting her information from the stars. But no-o-o-o-o, that wouldn’t have fit Manly P. Hallo’s agenda for this film; he ends his prologue by declaring defiantly that “astrology is a science,” and the story he concocted was an attempt to establish that.

The plot kicks off on an ocean liner on the last leg of a journey across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco, during which Ming tells Phillip Curey (James Stephenson, the quite interesting British-born actor who seemed headed for a major star career when he died suddenly in 1941 at age 52 of a heart attack after having made 40 films in just four years) that he has just a day or two left to live. Carey is duly killed that night in his apartment in San Francisco (which we get to see a lot more of than we would in The Maltese Falcon three years later, including stock footage of cable-car tracks and a “Chop Suey” sign that looked identical to the one that used to adorn the now-closed Pekin Café in San Diego: both Charles and I wondered if there had been a company mass-producing these signs for Chinese restaurants nationwide), and the mystery becomes a whodunit in which Ming’s astonishingly uncanny astrological skills are put to work by the police investigating the crime, even though the lead detective, Inspector Jim C. Gregg (Charles C. Wilson), is scared to death that word is going to leak out that he’s using an astrologer, of all people, to solve a murder.

The principal suspects include Ming herself – the police detain her briefly and I wondered whether writers Hall and Coldewey were going to use the device of Josephine Tey in her novel A Shilling for Candles (1936), in which a well-known astrologer first predicts the death of a movie star and then kills the star herself to make the prediction come true. (Tey’s novel was filmed in 1937 by Alfred Hitchcock as Young and Innocent, but he and his writers, Charles Bennett and Edwin Greenwood, changed both the identity of the murderer and the motive.) But once again Manly P. Hall’s political and social agenda got in the way; not only was he not going to make the astrologer a clever faker, he wasn’t going to make her a killer either. Instead the finger of suspicion points to Doris Kane (Margaret Lindsay, top-billed and proving to be a quite authoritative actress despite the claims of Bette Davis, who in the 1930’s was frequently cast as the “bad girl” to Lindsay’s “good girl,” that she was wooden and uninteresting) and her supposed “brother,” Larry Camp (Anthony Averill).

Doris was engaged to Phillip Carey even though she couldn’t stand him – her mother (whom we never see) had arranged the marriage even though Larry was the man she really loved. Of course Ming figures out from their charts that Doris and Larry are not sister and brother, and the real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Phillip Carey’s business partner, Frederick Gow (Leonard Mudie, trying his best to pass himself off as Chinese in a film with a real Chinese – or at least Chinese-American – actress in the female second lead!), who was using their Oriental imports business as a front for smuggling drugs without Carey’s knowledge. The climactic revelation occurs in the gallery from which Carey and Gow sold their (above-board) items,which turns out to be honeycombed with secret passages, in one of which Gow ambushes and traps Ming until she is saved by Carey’s butler, Shields (Eric Stanley, Virgo – the only Virgo in the cast, which was a source of pride because both Charles and I are Virgos), who kills Gow in what the authoriites consider justifiable homicide. When Were You Born has a credit roll in which the actors are shown in brief clips from their roles in the movie – only instead of being identified with their character names, as was the usual practice with these credits (especially at Warner Bros.), they’re identified by their astrological sign.

When Were You Born was apparently intended as the first of a five-film series featuring Anna May Wong’s astrologer character, but alas this was the only such film actually made. Manly P. Hall would turn up on screen two years later in a promotional trailer for the 1940 film Black Friday – in which Boris Karloff played a science professor who does a brain transplant on a colleague , Professor Kingsley (Stanley Ridges), fusing part of his brain with parts of the brain of a gangster, Red Cannon, who happened to be in the same car crash. Only the transplant turns Kingsley into a modern-dress version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the sound of a police siren shifts him back and forth between professor and gangster. Hall was shown hypnotizing Bela Lugosi, who had a minor part in the film as one of the four ex-associates of Cannon who were trying to find where he hid the gang’s loot, to get him in the right mood to play a scene – a truly weird idea since Lugosi was playing a nothing villain role he could have done in his sleep (and not hypnotically induced trance-sleep, either!). Originally Black Friday was supposed to have featured Karloff as the professor and Lugosi as the scientist (given away by the fact that the character has the Hungarian-sounding name “Ernest Sovac”), but for some reason Universal changed plans at the last minute and sent out this trailer with Manly P. Hall essentially making Lugosi’s role seem more sinister than it was.