King of Chinatown (Paramount, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ultimately last night (Monday, September 18) my husband Charles and I had a cinematic nightcap: King of Chinatown, a 57-minute “B” production from Paramount in 1939 that Kino Lorber included as the last of three late-1930’s “B”’s starring Anna May Wong. It had a different director than the other two – Dangerous to Know (1938), made by Robert Florey; and Island of Lost Men (1939), directed by Kurt Neumann. This time the director was Nick Grindé, whose last name lost its accent grave over the years of his career; there’ve been plenty of jokes about the appropriateness of a man who ground out films as fast and as sloppily as he did being named “Grind[e].” But he was on his best behavior this time and turned in a quite exciting gangster melodrama from a script by Lillie Hayward and Irving Reis (later a director in his own right who made the first three Falcon movies at RKO and then had his big-budget debut with The Big Street, a quite good melodrama with hints of film noir starring Lucille Ball in one of her best dramatic roles as an entertainer who’s crippled by her gangster boyfriend and acquires Henry Fonda, a busboy who’s long had a crush on her, as her caregiver).

King of Chinatown is interesting in that both the male leads from Dangerous to Know and Island of Lost Men, Akim Tamiroff and J. Carrol Naish, are in it. Tamiroff plays the titular “King of Chinatown,” Frank Baturin (once again, as in Dangerous to Know, he had an ethnically ambiguous last name; apparently “political correctness” was already a “thing” even in the late 1930’s), who’s organizing a so-called “protection” racket to extort money out of honest Chinese merchants by threatening to blow up their businesses if they don’t pay. Naish plays a character known only as “Professor,” an ex-con whom Baturin hired as his accountant and consigliere – only, as we of course learn well before Baturin does, he’s really gone over to Baturin’s hated rival, gangster and gambler Mike Gordon (Anthony Quinn, a “regular” in Paramount’s “B”’s just then; he was in all four of these Anna May Wong cheapies, including Daughter of Shanghai, which wasn’t in the Kino Lorber box but I got from a grey-label source via eBay). The action includes a light-heavyweight prize fight between Gordon’s boy, “Slugger” Grady (Jimmy Vaughn), and Chinese-American fighter Tommy Wu (Charles Lee). Baturin bets $20,000 on Grady and is therefore incensed when Wu wins; he tells “Professor” to arrange a “hit” on Gordon to avenge his loss on Grady, but “Professor” tells Baturin’s hit person deliberately to miss, and later Baturin is shocked to find that Gordon is still alive, much like the finales to Rigoletto and Carmen. In case you’re wondering how and why Anna May Wong fits in with all this, she’s actually a trained surgeon, Dr. Mary Ling, whose father, Chang Ling (Sidney Toler, future Charlie Chan and blessedly the only non-Asian “yellowface” actor cast as an Asian in this movie; though he’s made up to look considerably older than he did as Charlie Chan and it’s yet another movie where we’re told he’s the heroine’s father but he looks more like her grandfather) helped put her through medical school with the profits from his business selling traditional Chinese herbs. (Writers Hayward and Reis, working from a story by future Hollywood 10 blacklistee and Salt of the Earth director Herbert J. Biberman, could and should have made more than they did of the contrast between traditional Chinese medicine and the Western sort Mary has trained in.)

Only just as she’s about to be made a resident surgeon at the local hospital where she works, she suddenly decides to chuck it all and go to China to work as a medic for a missionary. She’s abetted in this by her attorney/boyfriend, Robert Li (Philip Ahn), who’s on hand to help her father deal with the protection racket. Chang Ling steadfastly refuses to deal with Baturin, but Mary – at least at first – is captivated by his surface charm (though since he’s played by Akim Tamiroff that surface charm is going to have to be assumed) and willing to take his money to help the missionaries back in China. Midway through the movie Baturin is badly wounded by Morgan and Mary appoints herself as his caregiver in the hospital; there’s also a comic-relief couple consisting of Mary’s nurse Dolly Warren (Bernadene Hayes) and her boyfriend, ambulance driver “Potatoes” (Ray Mayer), who presumably is called that because he’s the stereotypical Irishman. When Baturin is discharged from the hospital Mary gets herself appointed as his home-care nurse, and she demands (and gets) him totally isolated from all news media and all his former friends and associates on the ground that trying to run his business will only stress him out and delay his recovery. It’s not quite clear whether Baturin lives or dies at the end – my impression he did the ‘tis-a-far-far-better-thing-I-do number, having Mary and Bob run off to China together on the Pan Am China Clipper while he stays behind for an ambiguous fate – but Mary and Bob fly off (and a closeup shows a wedding ring on her finger) while leaving everyone and everything else to fates we can only guess at. Though this film could have done with at least 10 more minutes of running time to tighten up all the loose ends in the plot, King of Chinatown is actually pretty good, giving director Grindé more potential than usual and allowing Anna May Wong to play a character of some independence and self-actualizing spirit instead of the usual stereotypical drip. Still, in stepping out of a potentially tremendous career as a hospital surgeon to work in China in barely equipped clinics definitely seems, especially in today’s highly status-conscious age, to be trending downwards!