S****s, slaves and seduction
Hollywood used Anna May Wong to embody every Oriental stereotype in
the book. But her talent shone through, says Matthew Sweet
Wednesday February 6, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2253166,00.html
The Guardian
When Anna May Wong reached China in 1936, some said she should never
have been allowed down the gangplank. She was a third-generation
Chinese-American on a mission to reconnect with her family's home
culture, but she was much more than just another tourist. She had
starred in the first Technicolor epic, had sparred with Marlene
Dietrich in Shanghai Express, had sunk the first rivet into the steel
skeleton of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and was the most admired Asian
actor in western cinema: a glossy, ****mmering presence. But she had
achieved her status by embodying the whole canon of western fantasies
about the Chinese. And she knew it.
In 1933, Doris Mackie of Film Weekly magazine visited Ealing studios
to observe the shooting of a sweaty tropical melodrama called Tiger
Bay, and found its star railing against cinema in general and
Hollywood in particular. "Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly
always the villain?" asked Wong. "And so crude a villain. Murderous,
treacherous, a s**** in the grass. We are not like that. How should we
be, with a civilisation that is so many times older than that of the
west?"
In the past decade, the reputation of Wong has been returned to
brilliant life. Her image - the intense gaze, the sleekly serpentine
arms, the impossibly reflective flapper bob - is in circulation again,
in poster tubes and postcard racks. There have been two new
biographies and a meticulous filmography, and now comes a do***entary
about her life. Called Frosted Yellow Willows, a literal translation
of her Cantonese name, the movie has its UK premiere at the National
****trait Gallery on Friday.
This is mainly due to the rediscovery of Wong's performance in the
1929 melodrama Piccadilly, in which she plays Shosho, a kitchen
scullion whose gyrations among the soap suds of a West End club lead
to a star residency above the stairs. The film was dismissed as
vacuous by generations of critics who never had the privilege of
seeing it. Now it is recognised as a masterpiece whose power is
derived, in part, from Wong's skilful manipulation of familiar
oriental cliches. "I danced once before in Limehouse," reads one
tantalising intertitle. "But there was trouble, men, knives."
Frosted Yellow Willows tells the story of Wong's birth in her father's
laundry in Los Angeles, her single-minded devotion to the movies, her
rise to fame, her dealings with a crazy extortionist who threatened
her family, her tireless war work. But it seems confused about how we
should now regard her. The film celebrates her as a pioneer, but
invites the viewer to despise much of her work - all those 1930s crime
dramas in which she plays a gangster's moll, a beautiful assassin or
the knife-wielding offspring of Fu Manchu. It offers her as a victim -
enumerating the painful moments when she was passed over in favour of
western actors with unconvincing makeup, or cast, improbably, as an
Inuit or a Native American - yet the footage from her pictures shows
that she transcended this status. And it makes little of her boozing
and complicated love life. (The lyricist Eric Maschwitz is said to
have memorialised an affair with Wong in his song These Foolish
Things, but you won't hear it in this do***entary.)
And this is the trouble with Anna May Wong. We disapprove of the
stereotypes she fleshed out - the treacherous, tragic daughters of the
dragon - but her performances still seduce, for the same reason they
did in the 1920s and 30s. Watch her as the Mongol slave girl running
around with Douglas Fairbanks Jr in the silent The Thief of Bagdad. Or
in Tiger Bay as the proprietor of the sultriest dance hall in British
Guyana, spooking some troublesome clients by suggesting she might have
poisoned their food. Or in the 1928 film Show Life, in which she
spears a lobster from a rock pool, cracks it with her teeth and sucks
out the meat. You'll see how much the camera loved her, and how
impossible it is not to feel the same - whatever ideological badness
we might now detect in these pictures.
By the war, Chinese-flavoured melodramas had gone out of fa****on, and
Wong with them. But in 1960, after two decades of relative obscurity,
she made a faltering comeback, playing housekeeper to Lana Turner in
Michael Gordon's slightly pervy thriller ****trait in Black. It was her
last big-screen role and, four decades after her debut, the publicity
employed a tiresomely familiar language. A press release attempted to
explain her absence from cinema with a proverb, supposedly passed down
to Wong by her mother: "Don't be photographed too much or you'll lose
your soul." When asked in person, Wong's reply was very different: "I
was so tired of the parts I had to play."
ยท Frosted Yellow Willows is at the National ****trait Gallery, London
(020-7312 2463), on Friday, and at the BFI Southbank (020 7928 3232)
on Saturday
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