≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Suitcase Killer Charles and I went back online for an archive.org stream of a quite good thriller from 1937, Daughter of Shanghai, directed by Robert Florey from a script by Gladys Unger and Garnett Weston, with William Hurlbut (co-author of the script for The Bride of Frankenstein) credited with additional dialogue on imdb.com. What makes this one particularly interesting is that the leads are both Asian-Americans; Anna May Wong is top-billed as Lan Ying Lin, daughter of legitimate Chinese art dealer Quan Lin (Ching-Wah Lee), and though he’s only billed ninth Philip Ahn (whom I hadn’t realized until I saw the PBS-TV special Asian-Americans was not Chinese, but Korean) plays Kim Lee, a Chinese-American FBI agent who’s sent to San Francisco to bust a rung of “alien smugglers” – what today would be called “human traffickers.”
In the opening scene two men from the alien smuggling gang (one of whom is played by a young Anthony Quinn) are flying a plane containing six would-be undocumented immigrants from China. Alas, a Coast Guard plane is closing in on them (even though the smugglers’ plane is a 1937 monoplane while the Coast Guard plane that is chasing them is a World War I-era biplane, obviously represented by stock footage from a World War I aviation movie), so to avoid getting caught the smugglers pull a lever on their dashboard and a door opens on the floor of the plane, plunging all six people to their deaths in the ocean below. The public uproar over these wanton murders leads the FBI to send out Kim Lee to work from San Francisco and bust the gang. Meanwhile, agents from the smuggling ring show up at Quan Lin’s business while he’s entertaining wealthy white woman Mrs. Mary Hunt (Cecil Cunningham) and tell him sotto voce that he will accept workers from the people they’re smuggling – or else. “Else” happens almost immediately when the gang members waylay a taxi Quan Lin is using to go to a dinner at Mrs. Hunt’s place – they drive it into a moving van and then take the van to a pier and shove the car containing Quan Lin and his daughter Lan Yang Lin into San Francisco Bay, where they’ll drown.
Only Our Heroine manages to escape and swim to shore safely (though her fancy evening dress looks immaculate even after she’s supposed to have escaped from a sinking car in it), where she shows up at Mrs. Hunt’s party and explains that her dad was wayiaid and killed on the way. [Not true: she actually escaped before the baddies sent the cab into the water, so there was no reason for her to be wet when she got away. – M.G.C., 8/27/23.] This isn’t news to Mrs Hunt because, as a previous scene has shown, she is the mastermind of the smuggling ring; she ordered her men to finish off the Lins because Quan Lin was about to turn over a dossier he’d compiled on the smugglers to Kim Lee, and Mrs. Hunt wanted to make sure not only that he would be killed before he got to Kim but all copies of the dossier would be destroyed. Naturally she chews out the gangsters on her payroll for letting Lan escape. Meanwhile, Lan decides to go undercover and infiltrate the gang through their headquarters at “Port O’Juan” on Clipperton Island off the east coast of Mexico.
Clipperton Island actually exists, and was the subject of an international dispute between Mexico and France (oddly, they got the king of Italy to arbitrate; they filed the petition in 1909 but it wasn’t adjudicated until 1931, when the son of the original Italian king they’d submitted it to ruled in favor of France). But no one actually lived there except a garrison of Mexican soldiers who, since the island was barren and no plants could grow on it, lived off a herd of pigs who themselves survived by eating a sort of crab humans can’t eat but pigs can. But the non-availability of plant life probably accounted for the fact that by the time the Mexican government sent a ship to evacuate their garrison, only one man was left: the others had died of scurvy. When the French took over, the first thing they did was slaughter all the pigs. But the city of “Port O’Juan,” depicted here as a lawless Safe in Hell-style place where the smuggling ring’s agent, Otto Hartman (Charles Bickford, second-billed), runs a raunchy club that’s a front for the smugglers, is entirely fictional.
To work her way into the gang, Lan gets a job as a dancer – obviously Hartman hires her so he can get in her pants – and this arouses the jealousy of his former mistress among the dancers, Olga Derey (Evelyn Brent, who’d been on the cusp of stardom in the late 1920’s thanks to Josef von Sternberg’s frequent use of her, though when Sternberg went to Germany in 1930 to make The Blue Angel that film’s star, Marlene Dietrich, became his new favorite and he never worked with Brent again). There are a lot of atmospherically photographed action scenes in various grungy clubs (including one in which she does her dance routine and is introduced as “the daughter of Shanghai,” the one reference to the film’s title), and one sequence that rips off the 1922 Paramount film Moran of the “Lady Letty” in which Lan disguises herself as a man to sneak aboard a freighter containing the latest batch of trafficked immigrants, only her long hair slips out from under her cap and gives her away., The ship’s captain, Gutner (Fred Kohler), is ready to rape her when fortunately she’s saved by Kim Lee and the opportune arrival of the Coast Guard.
In the end Mrs. Hunt and her fellow gangsters are apprehended, thanks to a change of heart by her manservant, dumb but good-natured Andrew Sheets (Buster Crabbe, though billed here under his real first name, Larry), who’s disgusted that his boss wants him to kill that nice young Asian couple. Kim Lee and Lan get together in a car, where he asks her if she’d like to move to Washington, D.C. and she says, “Are you asking me to marry you?” Daughter of Shanghai is a quite good movie for lts relatively low ambition and a running time of just over an hour, and Robert Florey proves himself a quite capable director good at extracting maximum entertainment quality out of a minimal budget. In fact, he was so good at doing this that, like Edgar G. Ulmer, he spent virtually all of his career stuck making “B” movies and never got the quality productions and budgets he deserved.
