The Chinese Mirror

A Forgotten Chinese-American Film Pioneer: Esther Eng

    Frank Bren, a Hong Kong-based researcher, has been doing considerable research on the early Chinese-American filmmaker Esther Eng.  Although she made nine feature films in the US and Hong Kong, only one is listed in the Internet Movie Data Base, and if she is remembered today at all, it is for her later career as a popular New York restaurateur. Frank recently published an interesting profile article about her in the HK edition of China Daily, in English, and we recommend it.

Photo Gallery: Anna May Wong

[left, Anna May Wong.  Click on image to link to the gallery]

    As part of an extensive pictorial review of modern China's Republican era (1912-1949), the news service PeopleNet has a picture gallery of Anna May Wong, the first Asian actress to make a dent in Hollywood, although the virulent racism of the time prevented her from getting the opportunities for major stardom she was capable of achieving.  The captions to the 30 photos briefly review her life and career, and while acknowledging the major role played by racism, it puts some of the resonsibility for exploiting it on Song Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek).  The article alleges Chiang used her U.S. political clout to encourage the suppression of Anna May's career, as Wong came from the immigrant class of Chinese that had a Western image of laundry and restaurant owners, gangsters, coolies, etc., and not the emerging, highly-educated elite the Madame herself came from and was now leading. 
    I will leave that topic to the political historians, but from the editor's standpoint, I hope that when an Asian actress at last takes an Oscar for Best Actress, she will devote a few moments of her acceptance speech to giving a shout-out to Anna May for blazing the trail, as Halle Berry did in acknowledging her debt to Dorothy Dandridge.

The Great Wall Studio: born from ethnic resentment

[left, Alla Nazimova, as a half-Chinese girl in Metro's 1919 production of 'The Red Lantern.' ]

  In January, 1921, a movie opened in New York City which provoked considerable outrage among the city's Overseas Chinese community.  The movie was "The First Born," which, while produced by and starring Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, featured Caucasians in yellowface filling all other significant roles.  But it was not the casting the Chinese found most objectionable; rather, it was the movie's distorted stereotypes of what was purported to be everyday Chinese life and common practices:  female foot-binding, bizarre foods and drink, drug-dealing in the streets, opium smoking, frequenting brothels, etc. This was a second cinematic blow to Chinese ethnic pride:  less than two years earlier, another movie, "The Red Lantern," had opened in New York (ironically, on May 4, 1919), which gave similarly negative and warped images of the Chinese people and their culture.  Like "The First Born," it also had an A-list cast for the time, including Noah Berry, Reginald Denny, and Alla Nazimova in a key dual role as half-sisters, one of mixed race.  (The only authentic Asians were uncredited extras, including a teen-aged Anna May Wong.)

[right, a scene from 'The Red Lantern.'  Alla Nazimova is at left.  At the time, she was the studio's top money-making star]

   A delegation of Chinese community leaders went to the New York representative of Sun Yat-sen's Guangdong government, demanding he approach Mayor John Francis Hylan about the matter, which they did.  Hylan, a proud Irish-American familiar with ethnic slurs and stereotypes, agreed the films were unacceptably offensive, and took steps to ban them from further exhibition in NYC.  Unfortunately, this was the petitioners' only success at the urban level, as both movies continued to be shown in other American cities.  So the Overseas Chinese leaders took their grievance to the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, expressing to the board members how unacceptable they found these outrageous caricatures of the Chinese people and their culture.  The Board's response was not at all what the petitioners had wanted, in fact was insulting:  in effect, the Chinese were told that if they wanted accurate reflections of themselves, they should make movies that foreigners would want to see, not the silly and ephemeral comedy shorts that were the staple of Chinese moviemaking until that time.
    So the Chinese decided to do just that.  In May, 1921, with the financial support of Li Qidao (李期道), a wealthy New York Chinese, a group composed of New York Chinese residents and Chinese students pooled their talents and founded their own company to make movies which would accurately portray China and the Chinese.  At first, it was called the Changcheng [Great Wall] Motion Picture Manufacturing Company, and in 1922 they released two short films in New York:  these were "Zhongguo de Fuzhuang" 中国的服装  (Chinese Costume), and "Zhongguo de Guoshu" 中国的国术 (China's National Art) which were, respectively, introductions to China's traditional costume and its martial arts.  But the prospects for such a company in the US were dim, plus becoming a major US studio had never been the objective, so in 1924 the young students who had started Changcheng decided to return to China and move the company, renamed the Changcheng (Great Wall) Film Company, and bringing with it all its film equipment.  They set up operations in temporary quarters in Shanghai while a permanent studio was under construction, and moved into it in 1925.

1930s Censorship of Western Films

    Besides producing a film and getting it into the distribution and exhibition market, an important  phase in the process was the review of films before release, a function performed jointly by the Chinese government working with the studios, sometimes post-release in reaction to public opinion.  After the Nationalist Party unified China in 1927, the central government established a board of review similar to the later Hays Office in the U.S.  Unlike the Hays Production Code, however, the Chinese review board’s mandate covered foreign films, which still dominated the Chinese market.
    It is interesting to note which foreign movies were banned by the board during its existence, which lasted right up until the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937.  One of the criteria by which a foreign movie could be banned for distribution in China was whether it looked down upon or was hostile to the Chinese people or portrayed them in a negative manner.  Sometimes the films were banned after they had been released in Chinese theaters, in reaction to public outcry.  Perhaps the most famous incidence of this occurred around 1930, when Shanghai audiences' reaction to Harold Lloyd’s “Welcome Danger” threatened to result in violence.  “Thief of Baghdad” (1924) was banned retroactively, although when it had been released a few years earlier, public opinion was fairly evenly mixed regarding its Asian characters.  Some other 1930s Western imports banned for their portrayals of China or the Chinese included:  “Shanghai Express,” “Tod über Shanghai” ("Death Over Shanghai"); “The Bitter Tea of General Yan” “The Cat’s Paw” (another Harold Lloyd), and the joint German-Japanese production “Atarashiki tsuchi/Die Tochter des Samurai” ("The New Earth").  Examples of American films banned  during this era for reasons other than their portrayal of the Chinese image were 1931’s “Frankenstein,” and 1932’s “Forgotten Commandments” and “High Society.”  The grounds given for blocking distribution of the first two was they carried an aura of “superstition,” and the third for having “pornographic content.”

Charlie Chan in China

 

    In early 2007 the London newspaper The Telegraph reported on a survey taken among 3,000 British teenagers which highlighted how fiction and reality are so often confused in the public mind.  About a fifth of the young respondents thought that Sir Winston Churchill, the dominant British personage of World War II, was a fictional creation, while fully 58 percent believed Sherlock Holmes was real.

    This brought to mind a time in the early 90s when I was a visiting professor at a Beijing university, and a Chinese colleague was relating some of his own experiences in the US about a decade before.  He recalled viewing an American TV program (he couldn't recall its title, but I'm certain it was "Family Feud")  in which competing teams tried to match results of surveys taken among other Americans.  On one program those taking the survey were asked to name a Chinese person, past or present.  The top three responses were Confucius, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong, all very easily understood.  Ranking No. 4 was a more modern figure, martial arts icon Bruce Lee, but in 5th place was someone who (like Holmes) never existed, fictional detective Charlie Chan.

Douglas Fairbanks and "The Thief of Bagdad" Uproar

[This is a translation.  The original source: Zhang Wei 张伟 "Fan-peng-ke he Yuegong Baohe de fengbo" 范朋克和月宫宝盒的风波 (Fairbanks and the 'Palace Treasure Chest' Uproar). Dazhong Dianying (Popular Cinema) no.12 (2004):43]

Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) was one of America's most prominent figures of the silent film era, and served as host of the first Oscar Awards presentation. Fairbanks made nearly 100 films during his lifetime, of which "The Mark of Zorro" (1920), "The Three Musketeers" (1921), "The Thief of Bagdad" (1924), "The Black Pirate" (1926) and "The Iron Mask" (1929) are representative. His image in his films was always that of a righteous hero brimming with youthful spirit and vitality, an image that made audiences deeply fond of him, and spread his influence throughout the world.  In his Histoire Générale du Cinéma, Georges Sadoul wrote of Fairbanks that "he conquered audiences with his mastery of various athletic skills and his constant smile and optimism. To audiences, he was symbolic of a young America marching forward. He was no ordinary actor: audiences saw that same vitality in all the various characters he portrayed".

Normally, a world-class star of this magnitude at the peak of his popularity would visit China and be warmly welcomed there, but the situation was actually not that simple. One day in December, 1929, a wireless message went out from a passenger ship at sea, with a query indicating some concern on the part of the sender: "We hear that some people object to our films as insulting to Chinese, making it detrimental for us to stop over in Shanghai. Please advise." The senders were two world-famous American film stars on a round-the-world tour:  Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, Mary Pickford.

The Real "Shanghai Express"

   

From time to time, Turner Classic Movies carries the 1932 film "Shanghai Express", regarded by many film historians as one of Marlene Dietrich's greatest performances, and while critics have considered it a good movie, they usually stop short of calling it a great one. In "Shanghai Express", from the Austro-American director Josef von Sternberg, a multi-national gathering of passengers on the Beijing (Peking) to Shanghai express train are shocked to find that one of their fellow passengers is a woman of highly questionable background, the notorious Shanghai Lily (Dietrich). This concerns them more than the fact that a civil war is going on that may lengthen the trip considerably. A British Army doctor, Donald Harvey (Clive Brook), boards the train, and it turns out he knew her as "Magdalena" before she became a famous "coaster", defined as "someone who lives by their wits along the China coast." In those pre-code days, the implication was clear, Lilly did not make her living dealing fan-tan or managing an opium den: she was a hooker, pure and simple. In case anyone missed the point, in one of her more memorable lines Dietrich says, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily".

    Anyway, Chinese rebels stop the train, and after questioning the passengers, Doctor Harvey is taken hostage. Will he survive, and what if any role will Lily play? Who is the sinister Eurasian businessman (Warner Oland), clearly up to no good?  What about the mysterious Chinese woman on board (Anna May Wong), someone also shunned by her fellow passengers?