Anna May Wong - Before the Toll: Uncredited and Early Roles, Part 1
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...