Anna May Wong - Before the Toll: Uncredited and Early Roles, Part 2

Anna May Wong (left) in a still from Outside the Law

What is and what no longer is: texts and (dis)appearance or Gee, this is a lot to put on a fifteen year old

There are three available early films that Anna May Wong has small parts in. Each one is a classic or near-classic in its own right and normally, I'd happily review and analyze each one based on their own individual merits. However, given the context of this series, I'm looking at these works in relation to Anna May Wong's overall life and career and more specifically, with what we know of what was going on in her life at the time these films were produced.

We know that Anna May hung around movie sets, asked questions, and can surmise that she received more extra work and likely more uncredited roles than what we have documentation for. It's difficult to envision just how rapid turnover was for performers and crews from one film to another during the silent and early sound eras. We may safely assume that as voluminous as any given silent actor's resume might be, there may literally dozens of uncredited walk-ons in addition to lost call sheets we will never know about. 

What we have available as far as known titles are Outside the Law, Dinty, The First Born (in the British Film Institute's archives; not available for screening), Shame (lost), Bits of Life (lost), A Tale of Two Worlds, The White Mouse (1921 short directed by Bertram Bracken and starring Wallace Beery; which may be lost?). 

I'm following the production dates listed in the American Film Archive's records, as opposed to release dates (both production dates where I have them and the release years follow the titles in the section headings) since this gives us an idea of timelines in Anna May's life.

Dinty (1920) - production dates: "ended September 6, 1920", but note that the production was already mentioned June 26, 1920 (1)

With Dinty, Anna May Wong wrote that she had "a real part." (2) It's difficult to believe that there weren't other roles between The Red Lantern and Dinty; to reiterate, production logs survive of many more silent films than the films themselves, but if Anna May was only starting out with uncredited background roles as an extra, it would make sense that she would single this one out.

As Half Lotus, she is the docile wife to the notorious gangster of Chinatown, King Dorkh (Noah Beery in yellow face, again and not for the last time.) It is a more substantial role by far than what she would have in Outside the Law and as Hodges points out, after The Red Lantern where there was a sympathetic treatment of Chinese people (in China, to be clear), this may have been her first experience with both Chinese people being represented as villainous and/or passive. 

Outside the Law (1920) - production dates: "late June or Late October 1920"

With Outside the Law, Anna May finds another if not mentor, than an example to follow, of the immense amount of work one puts into the craft. Admittedly, she shared no scenes with Lon Chaney, but she had no doubt seen him at work and would later have a closer working relationship with him in Bits of Life. My assumption, too, is that getting to watch Priscilla Dean work must have been another example of how a woman could fill out a role convincingly and with a genuinely naturalistic turn. In many ways, Outside the Law is Dean's picture as her Molly and Wheeler Oakman's Bill double-double-cross Lon Chaney's gangleader Black Mike, out to sink his rival, Molly's father, "Silent" Madden. Framing Madden for shooting a police officer and getting him sentenced to eight months turns Molly sour on the teachings of Chang Low, a benevolent Confucian teacher in Chinatown. Chang Low is a well-respected member of the Chinese community as well as, seemingly, various members of the broader society. 

Madden tells his daughter to give up the life and don't follow his example; however, one more job is pressed upon her by Black Mike. It's a set-up to get Molly to take the fall and ruin both father and daughter. Chang Low, in the meantime, debates the ethics of sending an innocent man to prison, as this will result in his coming out of prison with murder in his heart. That said, he sees the innate goodness in Molly and believes she will do the right thing eventually. which (of course) she does, principally owing to both Bill's influence when he befriends a little boy in the apartment building where they're hiding out, but also, one assumes, based somewhat in Chang Low's teachings and the effects they had on her father. 

Tod Browning takes a more psychological approach to the gangster genre here, weaving in discussions about motivation and nurture versus nature. The version available is the 1928 edit, the 1921 release is lost and was considerably longer, much to the dismay of some reviewers. While I'd like to see that version found, the film as we have it is a taut, economic piece of work that shows Browning to be a master in his own right. Indeed, his use of symbolism and set-ups, and letting the actors do their work is impressive. 

As for Anna May Wong, she appears in one scene with another young Chinese woman and some children listening to Chang Low discussing about how a person can grow from darkness to light, in a bit of narrative foregrounding. 

Watching the sequence is a reminder that what existed outside the shoot that day was a young girl - she was only fifteen at the time the movie was shot - navigating and we can assume networking - her way through the industry, but also attempting to balance filial duties and educational requirements. Wong Sam Sing detested the movies and no doubt continued to reprimand his daughter. Her mother seems to have been less reactionary about the industry but worried that Anna May might lose her soul from being photographed. My understanding is that this wasn't metaphorical; a number of cultures held that photography took something of the essence of the person photographed to achieve the resulting image. It's not unwarranted; while it might not be the camera doing the soul-stealing, there is something to be regarded by the deadening of the soul in the consummation of wealth and fame. 

What we have in Anna May Wong's career at this point is a series of performances - most lost to history except in production notes, memoirs, and reviews - that disclose and obscure at the same time - a complex woman on her way to being more of a trailblazer than anyone of her contemporaries could imagine. 

It could be argued this is the case for any great actor, or any actor, for that matter. But as has been mentioned before, Anna May Wong exists uniquely at the crossroads of societal, cinematic, and historical situations that render what would be considered just another "promising young actress" as more loaded with intentionality/meaning. 

It's here, too, that I want to remark on a point I've made in other posts: normally, I tend to disregard the personal elements of this or that cast or crew on any given film. However, here we're examining the extant filmography of a woman whose work and life held greater implications than just the films. At the remove of a century, we also require a greater degree of interpretative analysis. History is not as simple as a sequence of events or dates. Conclusions based in retrospect carry the values of both the contemporary historian as well as current social values and prejudices. 

I'm not proposing anything novel or innovative in this series, but it's important to establish and re-establish checks on interpretative strategies. 

While we do have a great amount of information about Anna May Wong provided by historical sources, reminiscences of people who worked with and knew her, as well as her own words, the past remains subject to revision. It is an absence felt in the present by works left behind on the way into contemporary life. 

Even then, knowing how much of what we encounter in our lives is a quintessence of something that happened, that no longer is, whether a moment or a millennium ago, gives rise to a sense of the contingency of interpretation. We can, however, admit that in the case of Anna May Wong,  her disappearance, her erasure itself has been reversed; an erasure of an erasure yields a qualia of being.

This qualia, this being remains subject to many of the elements that obtained during her lifetime; the social pressures, the racism, sexism, and xenophobia yet remain as salient elements in today's world; however, as we watch the quick moment of screentime allotted to her in Outside the Law, and knowing what's to come, we can locate her significance in a broader historical and social arc and recognizer her as a signifier of changers across that same arc.

Pushing into the frame where we see Anna May regarding E. Alyn Warren's Chang Low, we can hold several elements in mind; this was an extremely motivated and intelligent young woman who was gaining a secure foothold in her art, was certainly lining up other roles (however small or uncredited), and who was also aware of both being an Other in this larger world as well as an object of desire. 

It is this last note that we will find ourselves returning to. By "object of desire", I don't mean merely an attractive woman. I mean, quite specifically, that she is a constellation of elements of objectification; she is - at this point - allegedly having an affair with Tod Browning, but within a year's time will be in another relationship with a man almost twice her age and will later be alleged further to be either a sexual adventuress, the fulfillment of the flapper philosophy, and/or a highly talented actor/self-promoter/intellectual/activist. She can be/was/is all of these things. These labels are ascribed to her according to the moment; she was certainly "desired" as an a cultural figure representing colonialist fantasies; the exoticized/eroticized "Oriental" mystery woman that is part and parcel of those fantasies and results from the attendant dominance of the ruling culture. She is/was desired for her surprising intellect but one has to ask if this was surprising at the time because she was a woman, an American Asian woman, an actress, or all three. 

Nested within each of these elements of desire is also the opposite; at each turn, one can assume that the systemic misogyny, xenophobia, and racism were implied, simply given who she was/is and what she (re)present(ed) to the world at large. 

This is a lot to put on a fifteen year old, but if we look at the industry at the time and the people she had already met by the time she shows up on screen in Outside the Law, we can tease out a portrait of a young woman who knew what she wanted, had an idea that she had the talent to get it, and no doubt was full of the kind of youthful, adolescent enthusiasm to keep on the path.

Any attempt to reduce Anna May Wong at this stage to a mere ingenue, however intelligent, is doomed to failure as it doesn't account for her willingness to play the long game. To be sure, at any given point in any artist's career, there is a sense of winging it, but there is implicit in taking up any such career, a kind of optimism to beat the odds and prove oneself worthy of the brass ring. Anna May must have been well aware of what she was facing in that scene with Warren in yellow face (especially after having witnessed Alla Nazimova and Chaney, and no doubt, other white folks doing the same thing); that she was now one of the few Asians in Hollywood who might eventually get roles with names attached to them, and that she, like others, would have to prove themselves worthy of the white establishment's attention.

A Tale of Two Worlds (1921); production dates: December 1920 or January 1921 (3)

The AFI Catalog lists the release date as March 1921 and Anna May Wong doesn't show up in the credits. That said, I think Gao Hodges and Rebecca Lee that Anna May is in the movie, but only for a beat or so. Hodges seems to think she's more of a presence in the film than I can make out, but what's most important is his observation that A Tale of Two Worlds sets up her encounter with how Chinese culture and by extension, Chinese and Chinese Americans were represented. 

It's got yellowface, yellow peril, and anti-miscegenation all up front. Wallace Beery plays another malevolent Chinese villain and the heroine is an American woman who was raised as a Chinese after her parents were killed in the Boxer Rebellion. She is so thoroughly acculturated that she believes she is Chinese and doesn't readily accept that she's not (though how else is she going to be saved by her caucasian suitor?)

It's very much a piece of its time for good and ill. I won't recount it here except to say that in addition to Beery, it is a showcase for Leatrice Joy, whose work in this and other films of the period is genuinely strong. She was a major actress in her day and exited film prior to the coming of the sound era. 

The only certain visual evidence of AMW I could make out is that she's one of the women auctioned into slavery. She's wearing a hat with a circular brim and beads hanging from the brim pretty much obscuring her face.

It's worth considering that even if Hodges' chronology differs from some, his observation holds good that by this point, Anna May likely knew the score of what lay in her future. That she soldiered on is a testament to her determination and as we will see sooner than later, her intelligence.

I do want to quote Hodges here as his assessment is astute. He recaps the film succinctly:

“This was the first time Anna May crossed paths with Goldwyn, an encounter that would resonate throughout her career. In this instance, she was able to work in a major production, staged in San Francisco’s Chinatown. An antiques dealer named Carmichael gains possession of a priceless Ming dynasty scepter. Boxer rebels in China murder Carmichael and his wife, so his daughter, Sui Sen (Leatrice Joy) is brought up by Ah Wing (E. A. Warren) in Chinatown. The Boxer leader Ling Jo (Wallace Beery) covets both Sui Sen and the Ming scepter. She, however, falls in love with Dr. Newcombe, a wealthy young American. Newcombe saves Sui Sen, who is, incidentally, white, and kills Ling Jo." (4)

But it's here that his sense of what Anna May Wong is going to run into repeatedly may have been first recognized (I would argue she may have seen this sooner; surely, just as a Chinese American girl, she must have had some idea how her culture was perceived - and colonized/exoticized - in popular culture in the United States).

"Anna May is relegated to the sidelines for most of the film, which nevertheless introduced major themes that would dominate her career. Sui Sen represented the white female captive taken by barbarians, a theme as old in American culture as the seventeenth-century Indian wars. In this melodrama, Anna May could see how desires of a Chinese villain threatened to corrupt a white woman, even if she seemed to be Chinese. The costs of love and sexual desire across racial boundaries were already a major theme in Hollywood’s Orientalist dramas and became major factors in Anna May’s career. The physical setting of the film in antique stores introduced Anna May to the more subtle Orientalist theme of nostalgia for the past. Only sixteen years old, Anna May was entranced by the antiques, which suggested sophisticated Chinese culture, and soon she began collecting them for her own home.” (4)

Goldwyn will, indeed, be a reflexive theme throughout her career (at least, until she goes to China) and as I mentioned, I think it's likely she already had an idea of what she'd be going up against in the industry. That said, Gao Hodges introduces a salient point that Anna was introduced, somewhat ironically, to the antiquity and sophistication of Chinese culture in working in film - whether this one or another.

Next up: Tool of the Sea! I am genuinely excited about this as I really like the film and any excuse to rewatch it is certainly welcome (see also a fair amount of her filmography).

Notes

1. AFI Catalog, Dinty. Hodges notes that the film was shot in November. I should probably defer to Hodges' dates since my assumption is that he likely has/had primary sources available to him. However, some things don't add up for me. AFI isn't likely to be quite so lax in their data mining. 

2. Harry Carr, "I Am Growing More Chinese - Each Passing Year!" Los Angeles Times. September 9, 1934 in Huang, p. 60. 

3. AFI Catalog. A Tale of Two Worlds. I'm also cross-referencing with the 1971 print edition (PDF), which tends to have more extensive information in some cases and lacks information in others. Production dates are more likely to be found on AFI's website.

4. Gao Hodges. Epub, no page number.

Bibliography

Gao Hodges, Russell Graham. Anna May Wong - From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend, Third Edition. Chicago Review Press Incorporated. Chicago, IL. (Electronic publication). 2023.

Huang, Yunte. Daughter of the Dragon. Liveright. New York. 2023.

Munden, Kenneth W, editor. The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures - Volume F2 Feature Films, 1921-1930. R.R. Bowker and Company. New York and London. 1971. pp. 784-785

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