The Tong Man (Haworth Pictures Corporation, Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the second film on TCM’s November 10 salute to Sessue Hayakawa, The Tong Man, was nowhere nearly as good. Based on a 1912 novel by Clyde Westover called The Dragon’s Daughter, The Tong Man was an all too predictable story of the tongs, the Chinese gangs that allegedly terrorized Chinatowns in American cities with large Chinese populations in the early years of the 20th century. Predictably, racist propaganda made them seem considerably deadlier and more dangerous than they really were. Ironically given that one of Sessue Hayakawa’s stated aims in starting Haworth Pictures was to challenge the racist stereotypes against Japanese people, The Tong Man played up many of the racist stereotypes against Chinese people – so much so that Chinese consul-general C. H. Chu and the Chinese Six Companies, the most powerful Chinese-American organization in the U.S. at the time, unsuccessfully sued to have the film banned in San Francisco, where it takes place. Clyde Westover insisted that the film was based on his own observations of tong criminality when he worked as a reporter in San Francisco, and one Hayakawa biographer, Daisuke Miyao, has argued that Hayakawa deliberately wanted to take attention away from alleged Japanese villainy by playing bad guys from other Asian countries – which didn’t work because they all blended together into a Hollywood image of “The Yellow Peril.”

My husband Charles noted the similarities between this story and The Ace of Hearts (1921), a Goldwyn Pictures film based on a magazine serial and novel by Gouverneur Morris, and it’s not clear which came first. Westover’s novel came out in 1912 and Morris’s in 1917, while The Tong Man was made in 1919 and The Ace of Hearts in 1921, so The Tong Man seems to have been first – though the situation, a basically decent man forced by his membership in an evil organization to murder someone he loves, had probably been used plenty of times before. Hayakawa plays Luk Chan, member of the tong run by Ming Tai (Mark Robbins) and boyfriend of Sen Chee (Helen Jerome Eddy). Alas, Sen Chee’s father, opium dealer Louie Toy (Toyo Fujita), has run afoul of the tong by refusing their demands for protection money. Ming Tai has fallen in love – or at least lust – with Sen Chee, and he insists as part of his demands on Toy that he be given Sen Chee’s hand in marriage. Naturally, Sen Chee wants nothing to do with him, especially in the bedroom. So Ming Tai convenes a meeting of the tong leadership to decide whether to kill Louie Toy for defying them – and once they give the go-code to kill him, they draw lots to see who will actually commit the murder. Of course Luk Chan gets the assignment to kill Louie Toy, and he’s saved from having to do so only through the intervention of his friend Lucero (Yutaka Abe), a so-called “lascar” (defined on Wikipedia as “a sailor or militiaman from the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, the Arab world, British Somaliland or other lands east of the Cape of Good Hope who was employed on European ships from the 16th century until the mid-20th century”) who works out a way to fake Louie Toy’s assassination by hiding him inside a secret panel that looks like a dragon’s head. Alas, Ming Tai emerges from the dragon’s head and claims Sen Chee as his bride.

At one point she tries to commit suicide with a packet of poisoned incense she got from her father’s stash, and for a while (especially since the titles had name-checked Romeo and Juliet) I thought that Luk Chan was going to join her, inhale the deadly incense (which my husband Charles compared to the fumes of the poisonous Datura plant with which the title character of Leo Delibes’s opera Lakmé offs herself), and die with her. Instead, along with Lucero, she and Luk Chan get on an ocean liner and escape to China. The Tong Man is an awkward movie, surprisingly racist given Hayakawa’s stated motives in founding Haworth in the first place, and with weak direction by Worthington – who’d acquitted himself marvelously in the more fable-like The Dragon Painter. The film is dull as dishwater and doesn’t really start to move until the final scenes representing the tong on the march against their recalcitrant member. While at least this one survived with the original English intertitles and didn’t have to be pieced together from multiple prints from other countries, it’s mostly a curio and Hayakawa’s acting is the only good thing about it. Critics both then and now have also attacked it for the many white actors in “yellowface” playing Asian characters. Helen Jerome Eddy must have had some box-office appeal then, since she’s billed under Hayakawa on his title card, but today one wonders why he didn’t cast his wife Tsuru Aoki as Sen Chee instead!