Philip Ahn

(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.