Anna Mae Wong

  • Daughter of Shanghai (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Until very, very recently, the history of Asian performers in Hollywood was, in a word, dismal – which makes the extraordinary career of Anna Mae Wong in the 1920s and 1930s even more remarkable. Alas, her filmography is not always pleasant to watch – her roles were often heavily smothered in exoticism even when they didn’t need to. It’s in that context that Daughter of Shanghai becomes something quite special – enough so that the film was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry in 2006: It’s a very, very rare film from Hollywood that actually gives Wong a featured role in a film that directly addresses issues of importance to the Asian-American community – in 1937! Here, Wong teams up with Philip Ahn as a pair of investigators trying to get to the top of a human smuggling ring. She plays the avenging daughter of a businessman who died resisting organized crime; he plays a federal agent on the case. As was often the case for B-grade genre films, Daughter of Shanghai breezes by at a scant 63 minutes, roaring from one plot point to another – the identity of the ringmaster is actually interesting considering the context of the film. Now, there’s a fair criticism to be made that the progressive values of the film outweigh its more traditional film qualities, or that the presence of two Asian-American leads doesn’t necessarily to a film that escapes the white-male dominance of its production crew and likely audience. That’s all true: the film is often problematic even with its qualities. But that should not lessen the landmark nature of the film’s achievements – a rare bright spot in an otherwise sorry landscape of Asian-American images in Hollywood history. Alas, it was a film released toward the end of Wong’s career – there were a few follow-ups to Daughter of Shanghai, but nothing like what it should have led to.

  • When Were You Born (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m normally a good sport for 1930s murder mysteries, and an even better sport for any movie featuring Asian pioneer Anna Mae Wong. But horoscope thriller When Were You Born starts on the wrong foot and keeps stepping on its own toes throughout. Even by the standards of 1930s films going nuts for dubious subject matters, this film goes all-out of very strange tangents. The opening of the film, for instance, has noted astrologer and all-around crackpot Manly P. Hall introducing the film by speaking directly to the camera and insisting that Astrology! Is! A! Science! It’s not a random cameo, as Hall also co-wrote the script – which features Wong as an astrologer whose understanding of the discipline gives her near-magical divinatory powers, to the point of predicting deaths. That would normally make her a prime suspect but in this film, she becomes a detective helping the skeptical policemen sift through the twelve suspects, each of them from a distinct zodiac sign. What Wong is doing interpreting western astrology despite being showcased as a mysterious lady of the orient is a mystery for the ages. While murder mysteries with a little bit of the supernatural were not exactly unknown in the 1930s, few were as thoroughly contaminated by the supernatural as this one, as the second of Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction are gleefully jettisoned in favour of astrology hokum – the “investigations” of Wong’s character pretty much consist in asking suspects about their date and hour of birth, from which she can pretty much divine their quirks, fate and breakfast. (It does not make for a satisfying mystery plot.)  Too bad – Wong remains a striking performer even in substandard roles when she’s asked to be overly stiff, and the film does have a few amusing bits of business, suggesting the importance of co-writer Anthony Coldeway in shaping the pseudo-scientific material in a half-competent commercial product. Still, I can’t bring myself to recommend When Were You Born except to audiences knowing what they’re getting into – I mean, it’s interesting that the film’s twelve characters are mapped so that they all fall on a different zodiac sign, with corresponding personality traits – but there’s a large step between this and an actually good film. [June 2022: Manly P. Hall… I knew this name meant something! I actually have a copy of his magnum opus, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, in my library: a thick, lavish book full of hokum that’s nonetheless a wonderful piece of conversation and contemplation. Which might as well be what I think of the film as well.]