Daughter of Shanghai

If there was a role for an asian female from 1920 to 1950, Anna Wong was first in line to get it! she was actually born in Los Angeles, but could play so many foreign, exotic types. Co-stars Charles Bickford, Buster Crabbe, Anthony Quinn, Philip Ahn. someone is smuggling people into the US, and when they knock off her father, Lan Ying Lin (Wong) goes to rich old Mrs. Hunt (Cecil Cunningham) for help. everyone knows that "Hartman" is the guy smuggling people underground, but no-one seems to be able to find him or track him down. we go to Port O'Juan, where she sees the whole operation. Lan wants to take the ledgers and bring em back as evidence, but it will be dangerous. this is another film where we sail off to the exotic "south seas", but we're really on the back lot of hollywood. pretty good stuff. fun to tag along as the adventure unfolds. In the happy years between the depression and WW II.

Anna May Wong and Charles Bickford make this human-trafficking film work very well. There is a shocking scene at the very beginning of the film where a load of illegals are just dumped into the ocean to avoid legal problems with the air patrol. Anthony Quinn, in an early role, does the dumping. Philip Ahn, the Master in the Kung Fu series with David Carradine, plays an undercover cop, and Wong has her own agenda to take down the notorious human traffickers. An entertaining film from beginning to end.

...screams a headline at the beginning of the film. Quick! Somebody notify agents Scully and Mulder. No, not THOSE kinds of aliens!

A human-trafficking ring makes an offer a Chinese American San Francisco/Chinatown businessman cannot refuse, except that he does. For that, and for taking the evidence that he already has against the human trafficking ring to the feds, said trafficking ring kills him. His daughter (Anna May Wong), rather bitter about her father's murder not ardently being investigated by the feds he was trying to help, decides to go under cover in the tropics, using the only contact name she has - Hartmann - and ferret out the killers and traffickers herself. She runs into G-man Kim Lee (Philip Ahn) while doing this, and they team up to bring the criminals to justice. Along the way they encounter a very unlikely Mr. Big and an even more unlikely hero who steps in to help them save the day.

This may be one of my favorite B movies of the decade. Wong and Ahn are certainly unusual leads in an American film of the day, and they're both great in their roles. There's a surprising amount of violence, including people being dropped to their death out of a plane, shootings, and brutal beatings. J. Carroll Naish and Anthony Quinn are typecast as two of the bad guys, but I was surprised to see Buster Crabbe, with black hair and a mustache, as a particularly sadistic cohort.

Rather unintentionally funny moment - In the opening scene the two guys piloting a plane full of aliens headed for the United States have been spotted by a government plane, which is after them. The two tough guys are inexplicably wearing matching checkered ascots. Recommended - the movie, not the ascots.

DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI is unique among 1930s Hollywood features for its portrayal of an Asian-focused theme with two prominent Asian-American performers as leads. This was truly unusual in a time when white actors typically played Asian characters in the cinema. At best, Hollywood assigned some Asian roles to Asian performers and some to whites stars in the same film, with results that seem discordant today even if widely accepted at the time. DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI was prepared as a vehicle for Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American woman to become a star of the Hollywood cinema. Appearing in some 60 movies during her life, she was a top billed player for over twenty years, working not only in Hollywood, but also in England and Germany. In addition, she was a star of the stage and a frequent guest performer on radio, and would headline the first American television series concentrating on an Asian character, THE GALLERY OF MME. LIU-TSONG (Dumont, 1951).

Born in 1905, Wong was the daughter of a Chinese immigrant who ran a Los Angeles laundry. Her Chinese name, Wong Liu Tsong, was Cantonese for Frosted Yellow Willow. A career in the movies began in the typical manner of the time; she saw a local film crew at work and knew at that moment the life she wanted to pursue. She overcame family opposition and by 1922 had played the lead role, a Madame Butterfly-part, in THE TOLL OF THE SEA, the first Technicolor feature. As simultaneously a star, yet one whose roles were necessarily limited, at least in Hollywood's view, by ethnicity, Wong's career oscillated between major roles and character parts or exotic bits in Chinatown or far eastern scenes. Wong embodied a Chinese beauty that was new to Hollywood films and beguiled spectators in Europe and the United States, who accepted her in any type of role, whether playing hero, villain, or victim. The frequency with which portraits and articles about Wong appeared in magazines, despite the many relatively small roles and secondary billing, demonstrated the incredible popularity she had with the mainstream Caucasian audience. Wong was typically described as an intelligent, independent woman whose life was suspended between the two worlds of East and West, invoking the racial mythology of the time. Nonetheless, she frequently found herself losing roles to white performers that should have been hers. The evidence of press coverage strongly suggests that moviegoers had more progressive inclinations than the conservative studio chiefs and producers who made the casting decisions. Wong's star was in the ascendant with the coming of sound, with a number of vehicles written expressly for her. In PICCADILLY (1929), she plays a nightclub vamp. The Sherlock Holmes story A STUDY IN SCARLET (1933) was changed to feature Wong. She appeared in Edgar Wallace's play On the Spot, about a gangster and his Chinese mistress, later filmed as DANGEROUS TO KNOW (1938), a masterpiece largely forgotten because it is out of television circulation and held by only one archive. DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI was another picture written for her, as Paramount in attempted to revive her star luster in the wake of a well-publicized trip she made to China.

No other late Wong movie so strongly situates her at the center of the action as DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI. She plays a woman attempting to uncover the murderer of her father, in the process exposing racketeers illegally smuggling Chinese aliens into the United States. The whole picture was shot in a month, and suffers from the budgetary limitations along with the use of many thriller clichés. The plot admittedly resembles a screen serial by placing the heroine in a series of perilous predicaments, but this was also one of the few forms available at the time for a woman to display her own courage and self-sufficiency. One of the sequences reveals her dancing skill, which was seen in many of her films, including THE Chinese PARROT (1928) and LIMEHOUSE BLUES (1934). Wong's costar and on-screen romantic interest in DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI was Philip Ahn. He plays perhaps the first Asian FBI agent seen on the screen, a part all the more interesting since the immigration racket is shown as controlled by Caucasians but broken by members of the very race it exploits. Ahn was the same age as Wong, and they were High School friends, but he had begun his screen career only two years earlier, in 1935. At the last minute, Paramount wisely assigned DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI to director Robert Florey, a French emigre who was also an enthusiastic devotee of Far Eastern art. Many of his masks, swords, costumes, and furnishings decorate the sets in this picture. Florey had directed in Switzerland, France, Morocco, England, and Germany, and earlier in the same year as DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI, he had made his second journey to China and Japan. Florey hoped to interest Hollywood in making movies on location, spending several months shooting footage from the streets of Shanghai to the Japanese film studios, and some of that film still survives. He had scripted A STUDY IN SCARLET for Wong in 1932, and he directed her next picture, DANGEROUS TO KNOW. In the four years after DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI, Wong's career declined once more. During much of the 1930s and into the 1940s she used her name recognition to speak out against Japan's war against her ancestral land and on behalf of Chinese relief. Two 1943 war films for a poverty row studio, BOMBS OVER BURMA and LADY FROM CHUNGKING, depicted the role of the Chinese woman in the conflict. They also marked Wong's last screen appearance as a movie star. Her remaining roles were sporadic over the final fifteen years of her life, and she died at a relatively youthful age, in 1961. Only in recent years has Wong's importance been recognized, and much research is needed into her life and films and those of other Asian pioneers during the Hollywood studio era.

First and foremost, it was very refreshing to see the treatment of Asian-Americans in this film. There are no stereotypes or actors in yellow face, and the characters are articulate, sophisticated, and intelligent. The two main characters unraveling a smuggling/extortion racket (the fabulous Anna May Wong and Philip Ahn) are of Asian descent but the parts could have been written as Caucasians. Meanwhile it's a group of white people who run this racket and brutally murder people. It's no wonder that Wong was so happy with this film, her first with Paramount, and said "I like my part in this picture better than any I've ever had before...This picture gives Chinese a break - we have sympathetic parts for a change."

Overall it's a B movie in terms of production value and the plot is simple, but it's certainly entertaining, there are moments of tension, and of course it also has Anna May Wong. She looks radiant while wearing a number of gowns, most of which she had purchased herself in China on her travels there the year before, which was a big event in her life. A great example of her acting ability is her facial reaction when she sees what's happened to her father in the film, and we also get to see her silky dance moves when her character goes undercover as a dancer in a tropical nightclub. I adore her and everything she fought for, and this film feels like a vindication of sorts, after the bitter pill of being passed over for 'The Good Earth.'

You can really feel the heat and seaminess of the environment her character finds herself in, and I thought director Robert Florey did a good job given the scale of the picture. Some of his camera angles and shots of things like people being dumped into the bay are quite good. The representation of women is strong too - aside from Wong, the kingpin of the crime organization is a tough woman played by Cecil Cunningham. You can also look for 22 year old Anthony Quinn as well. Quite enjoyable for me, and I wished it had gone on for longer than 62 minutes.

Quote: White nightclub patron, dismissive upon seeing Anna May Wong: "I don't speak Chinese." Anna May Wong: "I speak English."