by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was called Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words, and it was alternately fascinating and frustrating
because, instead of building it around interviews with people who knew Anna May
Wong (though some of those, including Paramount executive A. C. Lyles and a
relative of her occasional co-star Philip Ahn, did appear) and film clips of
Wong’s movies (though some of those
also appeared), writer-director Yunah Hong chose to build it around Wong’s
letters and published interviews. This wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d kept
the actress reading that material off-screen, Ken Burns-style, but no-o-o-o-o: she actually hired a modern Chinese actress, Doan
Ly, to play Wong on screen. Doan Ly (since she’s using a traditional Chinese
name instead of adopting an at least partially Western one the way Wong herself
did, I presume “Doan” is her family name) is superficially right for the part:
she’s the right height, build and age (and after having suffered through the 5’
6” Leonardo DiCaprio as the 6’ 3” Howard Hughes I’m especially attentive to
issues like that in biopics!), and her speaking voice is reasonably convincing
— though when we get to see footage of Wong’s 1936 trip to China to see
her relatives there (she was born in L.A. in 1905 but her dad had two wives,
one in China and one in the U.S., and in 1936, after the death of Wong’s
mother, her dad moved back to China but then later returned to L.A.) and the
voice we hear on the soundtrack is Wong’s own, narrating the silent home-movie
footage 20 years later, the effect is galvanic. Also, Doan Ly attempts to
reproduce Anna May Wong’s cabaret act, and she sings in a breathy, almost
toneless voice I can’t believe is at all like Wong’s own. (Wong’s singing voice
seems to be lost; as far as I know, she never sang in a film, nor did she make
records.) I’d already come to admire Anna May Wong’s career and curse the
institutionalized racism of Hollywood (and America) during her lifetime that
denied her the stardom she should have had — though even in the modern day a
brilliant Chinese actress like Gong Li hasn’t been able to rise much higher
than the muck of villainesses and “traditional” roles that constituted most of
Wong’s oeuvre — and by chance
Charles and I had recently re-watched A Study in Scarlet, which may have given Wong yet another “yellow
peril” villainess role but also offered some stunning Avedon-esque close-ups of
her by cinematographer Arthur Edeson.
This documentary mentions Wong’s greatest
career frustration — that she didn’t get the starring role as O-Lan in MGM’s
1937 film of Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth (according to this movie, she was instead offered
the second female lead, the villainess Lotus, who seduces the good Chinese
farmer played by Paul Muni away from O-Lan and ruins him) — according to
another documentary I’ve seen on MGM she actually tested for O-Lan but the
studio executives considered her performance too weak (and gave the role to the
God-awful Luise Rainer, who won her second undeserved Oscar in a row for it
after The Great Ziegfeld —
beating out Greta Garbo, who had given the performance of a lifetime that year
in another MGM production, Camille).
She faced opposition not only from MGM’s executives but also from Pearl S. Buck
herself, who wanted MGM to make the movie in China and cast exclusively Chinese-born Chinese actors instead of a Chinese-American like
Wong. Apparently Buck didn’t approve of all the villainous yellow-peril
stereotypes Wong had played and either didn’t understand or didn’t care that
those were the roles Anna May Wong was being offered, and it was a question of
taking them or not working at all. Yunah Hong covers Wong’s several trips to
Europe in the late 20’s and early 30’s, where she performed in vaudeville
(singing songs in English, French and Chinese) and made bigger, more elaborate movies like Song (1928, a German production directed by Richard
Eichberg, whom I’d never heard of before, though Hong makes him out as a major
director of comparable importance to the ones from the period I had heard of: Murnau, Lang, Wiene and Leni, with two
screenwriters I’ve also never heard of, though I have heard of Karl Vollmöller, who wrote the source
novel), in which she has an interracial affair with the male lead, Heinrich
George (later a favorite of the Nazis), though even in a European movie she
still had to die for transgressing the racial bounds in her affections. She was
also in Piccadilly (1929), a
British production (though directed by another German, E. A. Dupont) which also
featured Charles Laughton in a minor role, making his film debut.
Her first
sound film was called Flame of Love,
made at British International (the big studio that was at the same time doing
its damnedest to wreck Alfred Hitchcock’s career; in his six years under
contract to them he made the first British sound film, Blackmail, and his first masterpiece, Rich and
Strange, but for the most part he got put
on unsuitable assignments and it wasn’t until he worked free from them and got
back with the producer Michael Balcon, who had launched his career in 1925,
that he made the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a mega-hit which set the pattern for the rest of
his career) and filmed in English, French and German versions (Richard Eichberg
is credited on imdb.com as co-director with Jean Kemm but I suspect Eichberg
probably just directed the German version and had nothing to do with the other
two). She eventually returned to the U.S. and landed what is probably her
greatest film, Shanghai Express,
with Marlene Dietrich, under Josef von Sternberg’s direction — the clips from
it here seem to be masterpieces in indirection, with both women competing to be
as low-keyed as possible and project sexuality and exoticism by seeming to be
doing nothing at all — and then there was the disappointment of not getting the
lead in The Good Earth, a return
to her frequent silent-era casting as the second lead in Chinese- or
Chinatown-set films like Limehouse Blues with George Raft; a late-1930’s Paramount contract that landed her
fairly decent roles in “B” movies like Daughter of Shanghai (in which she was a woman who runs into Philip Ahn
as a Chinese-American FBI agent investigating a case of human trafficking of
Chinese immigrants; for once she and Ahn got to play the good guys!) and King of Chinatown; a sorry exit at the ultra-cheap PRC studios with a
couple of war-themed cheapies called Bombs Over Burma (the title was inaccurate in one particular — the film
took place entirely in China, not Burma — but all too accurate in the “bomb”
part) and Lady from Chungking; a
bit part in the 1949 film noir Impact and a career spent mostly on stage and on TV (she
did an actual series in 1951 called The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong but it only lasted a few months) until her death in
1961, just before she was scheduled to film an important part in the
Asian-American-themed musical Flower Drum Song. (Her actual last credit was a guest shot on Barbara
Stanwyck’s anthology series.)
I’ve noticed my comments over the years on films
in Anna May Wong’s oeuvre: the
1924 Peter Pan (in which Wong
played the American Indian Tiger Lily, “which makes it all the more
disappointing that scenarist [Willis] Goldbeck makes so little use of her and
the Indians”), the 1927 Mr. Wu (a
film that comes in for special condemnation in this documentary because Wong
played the second lead to Renée Adorée, a French actress crudely made up to
look Chinese; I wrote, “Frankly this film would have been better with Anna May
Wong in her role, not only because she was authentically Asian but because she
was a better actress as well”), Shanghai Express (in which, I said, Wong was “photographed superbly
by Sternberg and Lee Garmes and [came] close to matching Dietrich in sheer star
charisma — had the movie business been ready for an Asian mega-star in the
1930’s Wong would have had a far bigger career than she did!”), A
Study in Scarlet (in which Wong was “billed
second and stunningly photographed by cinematographer Arthur Edeson — the
previous year she’d appeared as the second female lead in the
Sternberg/Dietrich Shanghai Express
and Edeson and director Edwin L. Marin were obviously giving her the same
inscrutable treatment,” though Marin and the writers, Robert Florey and
Reginald Owen, took pains to point out at the end that Wong was simply the mistress, not the wife, of one of the white characters to
avoid any hint of interracial marriage), Limehouse Blues (in which George Raft was in “yellowface” as a
Chinese gangster about to dump his Chinese fiancée, Wong’s role, for a white
girl; “Wong plays this scene in her most sepulchral, ‘inscrutable’ tone, a far
cry from the hysteria with which white actresses usually played confrontations
with guys who were about to break up with them in 1930’s movies,” and I said
the film itself was “notable for the sheer beauty and power of the atmospherics
… and for Anna May Wong’s haunting performance in what was, alas, the second
lead”), Daughter of Shanghai
(“Once again it’s worthwhile to see Anna May Wong, who had the talent to be a
major star if the American audience had been open to people of color becoming
major stars back then. It’s ironic to see her playing a detective just four
years after she was one of the principal villains in A Study in
Scarlet, the Sherlock Holmes movie made by
KBS World-Wide just before it went out of business in 1933, and certainly her
role here is a throwback to the revenge figure she played so well in the
Sternberg-Dietrich Shanghai Express.
A nice bit of moviemaking featuring an almost forgotten star!”), and Bombs
Over Burma (the only one of those movies in
which I was critical of Wong, who “seemed to be sleepwalking through her
part”).
