Reaction Shots

No matter how often I watch Anna May Wong in her first starring role, no matter how much I prepare myself for the, let’s face it, racism, and no matter how much I say “it was a different time” (I refuse to say that’s an adequate excuse), I find myself both moved by AMW’s performance in itself, but also, for what it represents in the broader scheme of her career. It’s a tough little film.  Essentially, it’s   Madame Butterfly   transposed to China, but without the “hero” realizing he’d made a mistake and that he truly loved Butterfly, or in this case, “Lotus Flower.” No, Allen Carver here is a dolt whose wife pushes him to see Lotus Flower and clear things up. Let’s be clear; there are so many things wrong and not to just 21st century eyes about this film (and for that matter, Puccini’s opera, and the source material before it). I’ll get to all that in due course, but for the uninitiated, the film’s plot is simple and direct. An American man is washed up on the rocky shore...

Film history is laden with figures who left their mark and of whom we know relatively little. Ernö Metzner we know a bit more of through his association with Pabst, Lang, Lubitsch, and others, as an outstanding art director. However, he also directed a number of films, one of which is a bonafide masterpiece. In   Polizeibericht Überfall/Police Report: Assault,   sometimes called   The Accident , we have a work that presages both the gritty, hard realism of Lang’s   M , along with the visual experimentation of, say, Hans Richter. Referred to as the “inaugural example of Strassefilm”, a genre popular in the Weimar period, it’s stunning for it’s gallows humor, violence, and pure cinematic narrative. There are no intertitles, for one thing, and the story that unfolds has the punch of a sick joke while also reminding the viewer, uncomfortably, of how quickly fortunes turn. Briefly, the fortunes that turn on finding a counterfeit Reich mark are two. The first man picks the...

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 volu...

Context and the mileux of  The Red Lantern At fourteen, the young Anna May Wong fully besotted by motion pictures, was picked as one of 300 Chinese and Chinese Americans for a crowd scene in The Red Lantern , starring Alla Nazimova, at the time the most celebrated actress in cinema and renowned for her theater work. The film centers around Nazimova in yellowface (and this term will show up repeated throughout this series) in a dual role as Mahlee, a Eurasian woman and Blanche Sackville, her half-sister (who is fully caucasian.) The backdrop of the film is the Boxer Rebellion of 1901 and while I will be reviewing it elsewhere, due to this series being about Anna May Wong, I'm giving it a more than passing mention because of its and Alla Nazimova's significance in AMW's life.  It is difficult to overstate how much movies meant to Anna May Wong as an adolescent, how important Alla Nazimova was in cinema at the time, and how pervasive women and the power they wielded in the ind...

Anna May Wong, 1937/source unknown This has been a long while in coming. For the past decade or so, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around about how gender-based inequity and systemic exclusion of women from the American workforce changed rapidly in the years prior to the Great Depression. The emphasis in this blog, of course, is cinema; but I think what we see in the early years of film in the United States is a mirror to the overall westward expansion of the late nineteenth century and how the lack of regulation of the business of filmmaking allowed for more voices, and a greater, more equal distribution of power and profit.  What I hope to accomplish in this series is a kind of case by case examination of the overall trends in the industry in the years leading up to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, more or less the last year when women exercised any power of note in film production beyond editing, continuity, or acting. This is the backdrop/context to the industry when Anna May ...