Chu Chin Chow Film

[Monica Okane]

Onmy first day in London, I was led down into the bowels of BFI: a series of basement screening rooms, most only big enough to accommodate one person comfortably, with heavy, sound-proof doors that seal shut using a giant metal latch. They would probably make good bomb shelters. What could have been a dismal environ was fortunately made exactly the opposite by Stephen Tollervey, the cheerful chief film technician who manages archival visits at BFI. He delivered stacks of 35 mm reels to my little screening room, sometimes along with a cup of tea and a plate of digestives, showed me how to spool the film so that I could watch it on the hulking Steenbeck editing machine, and affably inquired about what I thought of the films at the end of each day.

I started my mini film festival with Song, also called Dirty Money in German or Show Life in the British release. This was the film that Anna May Wong left Hollywood to make in Berlin in 1928, that earned her a cult following in Europe, and made her a star in the eyes of then-wannabes Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl.

This month\u2019s dispatch is coming to you a week and a day late with what I think is a pretty good excuse. For the last week and half I\u2019ve been in London watching some of Anna May Wong\u2019s rare and hard to find European films at the British Film Institute (BFI) and going through old movie magazines at the British Library.

The films I liked best were those that felt imbued with AMW\u2019s heart and soul. In my two favorites, Song (1928) and Pavement Butterfly (1929), AMW\u2019s capacity as an actress and artist is on full display. As you might expect, though, not all of the films held up so well.

The limitations of Anna May\u2019s race as dictated by the dominant culture (in this case, primarily English) bleed through the frames in pictures like The Flame of Love (1929), in which British censors forbade AMW from kissing her co-star John Longden on screen; Chu Chin Chow (1934), a retelling of \u201CAli Baba and the Forty Thieves\u201D where AMW plays the duplicitous slave Zahrat; Tiger Bay (1934), an enjoyable film that nonetheless blocks AMW from being the love interest and instead has her play the surrogate mother of an orphaned white girl\u2014she is ultimately the one who gets to fall in love and marry; and Java Head (1934), a kind of Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner set in 19th-century England with AMW and John Loder replacing Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton, except the shunned Chinese wife dies in the end (but at least she got to kiss her husband?).

Whether they were revelations or disappointments, the fun part of getting to watch these films was experiencing them for the first time like a regular moviegoer. I\u2019ve often had to rely on vague, lackluster movie synopses instead of watching AMW\u2019s films myself since many of her early films are no longer extant, and two years into the pandemic, certain archives (ahem, UCLA and Margaret Herrick Library) remain closed to the public. I\u2019ve said it before, but I\u2019ll say it again: Knowing something because you\u2019ve read it in a book is not the same thing as knowing something because you\u2019ve seen it with your own eyes. So I packed my bags for England, one of the few places where her European films have been preserved.

The screenplay was written by Karl Vollm\u00F6ller specifically for AMW, which is why it was retitled Song, a nod to her Chinese name Wong Liu Tsong. The story, which sounds absurd on paper, follows a Malaysian street urchin in an unnamed Middle Eastern city that looks very much like Istanbul. Jack, a man with a sordid past, valiantly saves Song from two male assaulters; smitten with his bravery, Song falls in love with Jack and becomes the hula-skirted dancer in his knife-throwing act at a local cabaret, but Jack\u2019s still hung up on his ex, a famous ballet dancer named Gloria Lee, who just happens to come to town on tour. Jack realizes the only way to win Gloria back is by buying her the diamonds and furs she covets, so he joins an ill-fated crew of train robbers who get caught, hence the title \u201Cdirty money\u201D\u2014money is the root of all his problems.

Jack evades arrest by hiding beneath the stalled train but the scalding excess steam streaming from the engine damages his eyes and leaves him half-blind, a serious liability when you\u2019re in the knife-throwing business. AMW steals the money needed for the operation to restore his sight and nurses Jack back to health, even pretending to be Gloria in her castoff clothing. Jack strips off the bandages on his eyes to see that the woman he\u2019s caressing is not Gloria, but Song. He flies into a rage and violently throws her out. TL;DR: Jack realizes too late that his faithful love was Song all along. He shows up repentant at her sword-dancing show at the Palace Hotel. Startled, Song trips and falls on one of her own swords and dies. Fin.

Eichberg\u2019s evocative rendering of the melodramatic storyline coupled with Anna May\u2019s luminous performances throughout, by turns heart-wrenching, suspenseful, and comedic, make Song an unlikely triumph. Though the film was made during the waning days of German Expressionism, its visual style and camera techniques were clearly influenced by the prevailing aesthetics of the era. Expressionism as a movement rejected aspirations of cinematic realism. Instead it sought to express emotions lyrically, dramatically, through personification, metaphor, and pathetic fallacy on screen. As Samuel Harries puts it, \u201Cexpressionist films showcase dramatic, revolutionary interpretations of the human condition.\u201D

When it rains, it pours\u2014the sky floods the streets, drenching the miserable-looking Song as she seeks refuge in Jack\u2019s shack. The world inside the frame goes completely topsy-turvy when Jack, in a deranged fury, throws his knives recklessly across the room at Song while she scrambles out of his line of fire. And for one brief moment before her life expires, Song looks up at Jack, her one true love, glowing like an angel with a halo of light encircling her head.

(Btw, you don\u2019t have to travel to London to watch AMW\u2019s films. The Gallery of Anna May Wong channel on YouTube run by dedicated AMW fan Rebecca Lee has collected a number of AMW\u2019s films and made them available to the public. You can also watch an abbreviated version of Song posted by another film buff here.)

When I wasn\u2019t hunkered down in a windowless screening room or holed up in a corner of the British Library with 15 years worth of Picturegoer issues, I spent my time in London pounding the pavement, retracing Anna May Wong\u2019s footsteps across the city she came to love. At dusk one evening, I strolled down Brompton Road past Harrod\u2019s and scores of Parisian cafes, their pastel-hued confections calling to me from gleaming window displays. I continued on through Hyde Park, crossing the trails where she once rode horses, and over to the ritzy hotels and multi-million dollar homes of Park Lane, where AMW kept a flat that overlooked the park.

Despite the constant drip of London rain, I made my way down Oxford Street where AMW partied on the rooftop of Selfridges Department Store with Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff on the night of England\u2019s 1929 Flapper Election (the first time in British history when women ages 21-29 exercised the right to vote), and paid a visit to the Savoy Theatre, where AMW attended her friend Paul Robeson\u2019s theatrical debut as Shakespeare\u2019s Othello.

Over the weekend, I hopped a train down to the Knole Estate, a sprawling mansion on top of a bucolic hill in Sevenoaks, Kent. The house was the family home of Vita Sackville-West, friend and lover of Virginia Woolf, and inspired Woolf\u2019s novel Orlando. AMW left London for this posh getaway after finishing her first run on the West End in The Circle of Chalk. Perhaps she\u2019d been invited there by Eddy Sackville-West, one of the Bright Young Things.

On my final day in London, I treated myself to a lunch of butternut squash soup, smoked salmon, and sticky toffee pudding at the IVY\u2014the once humble caf\u00E9 that made its reputation by fueling London\u2019s theatre world with chicken salad sandwiches and in return became the place to see and be seen. I sipped my sidecar and tried to imagine catching a glimpse of Anna May Wong sitting at one of the restaurant\u2019s velvety green banquettes, holding court with the London set.

Writing a biography is like trying to assemble a massive jigsaw puzzle. Except you don\u2019t know where all the pieces lie, and no matter your dedication, the picture will never be complete. Human beings are complex mysteries, sometimes even to themselves. Yet every day the picture becomes a little bit clearer, and another puzzle piece falls into place, another blank gets filled in.

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