Daughter of the Dragon (Paramount, 1931)

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

Last night (Monday, May 13) Turner Classic Movies showed a number of films featuring Asian-descended actors as part of their salute to Asian-American Heritage Month and also a “Star of the Month” tribute to actor Sessue Hayakawa, who became a matinée idol in the silent era even though most of the roles he played were the stock racist “yellow peril” crap – including his most famous film, The Cheat (1915, reissued 1918), in which he plays a rich man who bails out a family of British aristocrats in exchange for the wife’s body, and in the film’s most famous scene (then and now) he literally brands her as his property in exchange for the money she and her husband needed to bail themselves out of a bad business deal. In the early 1920’s Hayakawa left the major studios and formed a production company of his own to make films based on Japanese history and legends, and to present a more positive view of Asians and their culture. Predictably, his venture flopped and he kept his career going by retreating to Britain and acting on stage, though in 1957 he made a comeback as the evil but honorable Japanese prison commander in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he got nominated for an Academy Award. TCM showed a whole group of films last night featuring Hayakawa, including one of Humphrey Bogart’s Columbia vehicles, Tokyo Joe (1949) and Jerry Lewis’s The Geisha Boy (1958), before finally getting to the one I wanted to see: Daughter of the Dragon (1931).

Daughter of the Dragon was also the first in a two-film group of movies featuring Anna May Wong, the L.A.-born daughter of Chinese immigrants who became the first Chinese-American movie star, though with only a few exceptions her parts were the usual racist garbage, casting her either as the innocent young flower undone by loving a white guy not wisely but too well, or as the vicious Oriental seductress out to work her wiles on the nice young white boy and steal him away from the nice young white girl. TCM’s Anna May Wong double-bill paired Daughter of the Dragon with Daughter of Shanghai (1937), which I’ve already commented on in this blog after seeing it twice in 2022 and 2023 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/06/daughter-of-shanghai-paemount-1937.html). According to TCM host Bob Karger, Daughter of Shanghai was Wong’s first film under a new contract with Paramount in which they promised her a respite from Asian-villainess roles and a few parts which actually depicted Asian characters in a positive light. In Daughter of Shanghai she plays Lan Ying Lin, daughter of a Chinese art dealer who’s murdered by a gang of human traffickers and takes up with Chinese-American FBI agent Kim Lee (Korean-American actor Philip Ahn, whom I’ve long wished had been cast as Charlie Chan) to bust the gang that killed her father. My husband Charles came home from work during the last 20 minutes of Daughter of Shanghai and expressed regrets that Paramount didn’t use Wong and Ahn to create an Asian-American version of the MGM Thin Man series.

Alas, to quote James Miller’s review of the 1928 British Columbia Aïda in the January-February 1984 Fanfare (which he invidiously compared with the competing HMV version the same year), “that isn't the [movie] we’re dealing with.” Daughter of the Dragon is the third film in a sequence Paramount made in the early talkie era based on Sax Rohmer’s infamously racist stories of Chinese super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu, with Warner Oland playing him. It was preceded by The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) and The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930). Oland also played Fu Manchu in a spoof of detective movies in 1930’s revue film Paramount on Parade before moving on to Fox and his long-running series of films as a sympathetic Chinese, Charlie Chan. In Daughter of the Dragon, Fu Manchu reappears after having been thought killed to continue his revenge against the Petrie family, a line of British aristocrats whom Fu blames for killing his own family during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. When the film opens the Petries have already lost a grandfather and a father to Fu’s revenge campaign, and they’re left with Sir John Petrie (Holmes Herbert) and his son Ronald Petrie (Bramwell Fletcher, a year before he accidentally revived Boris Karloff’s mummy character in The Mummy and went insane when he realized what had happened). Fu Manchu sneaks back and forth between his home and the Petries’, which is conveniently next door, through a secret tunnel and a trap door concealed in a nondescript wall.

The film’s leading character is Chinese dancer Ling Moy (Anna May Wong), who’s become a major success in London and is about to do a tour of South America. Only her plans are altered when her long-lost father, whom she’s never met as an adult, turns up and is, of course, Dr. Fu Manchu. He surprisingly easily enlists her aid in carrying on his revenge plot against the Petries, which includes turning her full quota of sexual wiles on Ronald Petrie and getting him to abandon his white fiancée, Joan Marshall (Frances Dade). Clumsily directed by Lloyd Corrigan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with The Sheik screenwriter Monte Katterjohn and future Mr. Smith Goes to Washington writer and open Communist Sidney Buchman based on a Rohmer novel actually called The Daughter of Fu Manchu (though according to one online source, an article on Fu Manchu movies at https://pulpfictionbook.store/2020/01/18/the-filmography-of-fu-manchu/, Paramount actually didn’t own the rights to The Daughter of Fu Manchu so they cooked up something vaguely like it), Daughter of the Dragon includes a sympathetic Asian character. He is Scotland Yard detective Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa, a decade after he appeared with Anna May Wong in one of his indies, The First-Born, a now lost film. In The First-Born he was top-billed and she was a bit player, while here she has top billing and he’s billed third under her and Oland), who’s on the trail of Fu Manchu because the people in charge at Scotland Yard obviously think it makes sense to set an Asian to trap an Asian.

Fu Manchu uses that secret tunnel to sneak into the Petrie home and kill Sir John by poisoning his tobacco (I’m not making this up, you know!) before getting killed himself about two-fifths of the way through the movie (though he reappears as a ghostly voice giving Ling Moy instructions from beyond the grave, sort of like Marlon Brando in the later Superman movies in which through leftover footage he continued to play Superman’s father, Jor-El, even after he died). His base of operations is the house next door to the Petrie estate, which is ostensibly occupied by Ling Moy’s manager, Morloff (Nicholas Soussanin) – only Morloff is a key part of Fu Manchu’s plot, though of course the Petries and their friends don’t realize that until the very end. Midway through the film Ling Moy decides to neutralize Ah Kee by seducing him, and there’s a very strange ending sequence in which Ling Moy and Ah Kee literally have a joint death scene while Ronald Petrie gets back together with his boring white girlfriend and the honor of British imperialism is saved … for now. Daughter of the Dragon is relatively naturalistic in terms of the way lines are delivered – though Anna May Wong’s idea of appearing “inscrutable” is to speak very slowly and softly, which worked quite a bit better for her in some of her other films than it does here. But in other respects it suffers from the crudity of early-talkie technique, including the virtual absence of background music. That may seem like a surprising comment from me, since I’ve frequently complained about the overuse of music in much of classic Hollywood’s output in the 1930’s and 1940’s, but here the lack of an action score only makes the film seem dull and the action sequences uninvolving and boring.

Daughter of the Dragon is notable for giving Bramwell Fletcher a chance to act with some power and authority – anyone who’s seen him just in his role in The Mummy is in for a surprise – and it’s also a “doubles” movie in that it features two actors who played Charlie Chan: Warner Oland and George Kuwa, a Japanese actor who played Chan in the very first film using the character, a Pathé serial from 1925 called The House Without a Key and based on the first of Earl Derr Biggers’ Chan novels. (The Chan movies have so often been criticized for using white actors in “yellowface” to play the title role – Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, Roland Winters – it’s worth noting that in the first two Chan films, The House Without a Key and 1928’s The Chinese Parrot, he was played by Japanese actors George Kuwa and Sôjin Kamiyama, respectively. So they weren’t Chinese but at least they were Asian! Alas, both silent Chans are lost, though Sôjin Kamimaya played a detective in the 1929 MGM early talkie The Unholy Night and that’s probably a good indication of how he played Charlie Chan.) Daughter of the Dragon is pretty worthless as a movie, though it’s at least staged on some engagingly elaborate Paramount sets (some of which I suspect were reused for later films including the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as the Marx Brothers’ 1931 Monkey Business). I’m generally not a fan of judging old movies, songs or books by today’s relatively enlightened standards, but Daughter of the Dragon is so imbued throughout with not only racism but sexism as well (there are more than the usual scenes in which Anna May Wong’s ability to carry out her dad’s revenge plot is questioned because she’s – gasp – a woman!) it was hard for me to find anything in it that entertained me.