Lady from Chungking (PRC, 1942)

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

Last night (Monday, October 2) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of intriguing movies, including Anna May Wong’s second starring vehicle for the ultra-cheap Producers’ Releasing Corporation (PRC) in 1942, Lady from Chungking. An imdb.com “Trivia” post on this movie says that because Japan was one of America’s enemies during World War II, Asian-descended actors no matter what their actual Asian ethnicity suffered professionally from discrimination and intensified racism against not only Japanese-Americans (most of whom were forced to spend much of the war in internment camps) but Asians in general. Anna May Wong went out of her way to let people know she was Chinese instead of Japanese, including “regularly supporting and doing volunteer work for organizations raising funds for Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion and domination of China.” I suspect Anna May Wong had started descending the career ladder even earlier, mainly because as an actor of color she was restricted to second leads in major movies like the 1926 MGM silent Mr. Wu (with Lon Chaney, Sr. in “yellowface” in the title role), Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich in 1932 and a 1934 film variously called Limehouse Blues and East End Chant with George Raft playing a half-British, half-Chinese gangster who dumps Wong for a white woman and suffers the consequences. Paramount, which had Wong under contract, gave her leads later in the 1930’s but only in “B” films like Daughter of Shanghai, Dangerous to Know, Isle of Lost Men and King of Chinatown. At least some of these parts were feminist trail-blazers; in Daughter of Shanghai she played the daughter of a murdered art dealer who teams up with a Chinese-American FBI agent (Philip Ahn) to bust a ring of human traffickers (and she and Ahn pair off romantically at the end), and in King of Chinatown she played a surgeon who flies off to her native China with a boyfriend (Philip Ahn again!) to work in a missionary’s medical clinic.

In 1942 Wong signed with PRC for two films, both of which cast her as a Chinese partisan and resistance fighter taking on the Japanese who were laying waste to her country and oppressing her people. In his classic book on “B” movies, Don Miller hailed the first Bombs Over Burma, as the better of the two films, mainly because it had a stronger and more visually imaginative director – Joseph H. Lewis, seven years before he made his masterpiece, the 1949 film noir Gun Crazy – whereas Lady from Chungking was directed by the terminally slovenly William Nigh. I don’t see it that way at all: both films involved at least one writer in common, Milton Raison, and though Lady from Chungking doesn’t have the occasional flashes of visual imagination of Bombs Over Burma, it’s otherwise a far better movie. For one thing, it casts Anna May Wong as an unambiguous heroine (in Bombs Over Burma she got victimized by typecasting that suggested she and her Buddhist-monk father were in league with the Japanese), a fully self-actualized partisan leader utterly committed to the cause of Chinese liberation. In the opening she’s working as a coolie in (presumably) a rice paddy, though she’s really from a high-born Chinese family. A Japanese officer, Lieutenant Shimoto (Ted Hecht), notices she doesn’t have the scarred, wizened hands of someone who’s been doing farm labor all her life and invites her to dress up and attend the reception that night for incoming Japanese General Kaimura (Harold Huber, who was quite often cast as Asian villains in World War II movies even though his real ancestry was Russian and Jewish). From then on the story turns into a knockoff of the Biblical tale of Judith and Holofernes, with Kwan Mei (Wong) gaining admittance to Kaimura’s private headquarters with the promise of sex, then murdering him (albeit just shooting him instead of beheading him the way the Biblical Judith did). Shimoto and the other members of Kaimura’s officer corps arrest Kwan Mei and execute her by firing squad, though the ghostly image of her keeps rising from her dead body and continuing her tirade against the Japanese occupation and her defense of the freedom and independent spirit of the Chinese people.

That last seems to ring a bit (or more than a bit) hollow now that Japan has been (more or less) a functioning democracy since the U.S. occupation ended in 1949, while China has been ruled by nominally Communist dictators since Mao Zedong led the Communists to victory in the Chinese civil war that year. Much the way I’ve long lamented that Germany, with its nasty authoritarian tradition through the first half of the 20th century, has managed to build a long-term functioning democracy since 1949 (just four years after the death of Hitler) while Russia remains mired in authoritarianism, it’s ironic to watch a 1942 movie in which China is hailed as a democracy and Japan damned as an evil dictatorship when the modern reality is at least largely the other way around. Lady from Chungking has some of the endemic flaws of World War II movies made during the war, including endless speeches from the main characters reflecting their various moral standings (no one ever accused Milton Raison or his writing partner here, Sam Robins, of subtlety) and an overall lack of moral ambiguity – the good guys are 100 percent good and the bad guys 100 percent evil. There are also flaws endemic to the output of really cheap studios like PRC, including overly familiar outdoor locations (at least one key scene takes place on the same rocky terrain as a million Republic Westerns – in fact, at first Charles thought this film was made by Republic instead of the even cheaper PRC – though Bombs Over Burma not only made use of those same rocks but put them on the screen far longer) and flimsy-looking sets. And it didn’t help that though the distributor of the print we were watching, Alpha Video Entertainment, presented the film in the correct 4:3 aspect ratio they cut off the top, bottom and sides of the screen all too often (leading man Rick Vallin, also Ava Gardner’s co-star in the Monogram cheapie Ghosts on the Loose, is so tall the top of his head is cut off in most of his scenes). But Lady from Chungking is an estimable film overall and it gives Anna May Wong a role she could really sink her teeth into: well photographed by Marcel le Picard (a decided improvement over the Bombs Over Burma cinematographer, Robert E. Cline), she delivers an exciting performance that grips the screen. She’s believable as an action heroine who helps two captured American pilots with the Flying Tigers squadron (Vallin and Paul Bryar) escape after the Japanese shoot them down, and the tragic ending of this film is far more convincing and emotionally moving than the happy one of Bombs Over Burma.