Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE

1934 - ***

Von Sternberg was a genius but one could argue whether he never quite 'got' narrative pacing or dialogue, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, posed tableaux, whips, furs, clusters of oppressive goose symbolism, ambient noise and Wagnerian gesture, all of which nearly suffocates the first half of arguably his best and worst of the Dietrich collaborations, SCARLET EMPRESS. Taken from the then still-sizzling diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia, the film begins in a flower-encrusted choke-hold as the stuffily regimented duty and sickeningly sweet yet brutally-regimented playtime of a young Austrian noble (Dietrich, in curls) is contrasted with overlapping montages of DeMille-level lurid tortures endured by the Proletariat at the hands of the fur-hatted Cossacks in frigid Russia. The handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge suddenly materializes like the first ever tall black shadow (with sable cape highlights) in the stuffy otherwise treacle-and-posey-filled brightly-lit Prussian parlor of Catherine's mother, to claim her for Russia's inbred maniac Peter (Sam Jaffe). Sexual sizzle seems in the cards, but the pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies and airless claustrophobia is a long time clearing. One of Austria's unbearable matriarchs pokes and prods Dietrich like a piece of meat at the butcher's until your feminist blood is curdling, and you want to go on a regicidal rampage; and it's only after Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow --and has her to himself, warming her up within all the en route lodges, between one controlling reptilian old broad and the another--that we feel we can start to soak up the glories of the snow and the richly photographed sable wraps without the worry we're going to get hit on the head with a fan. Louise Dresser overplays with vulgarly Americanized bossiness as the seated "dowager empress" trying to urge Peter to get into that marital bed and give this doe-eyed Austrian a go, but he prefers prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like a whispering Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland rather than the marital boudoir. Catherine's fine with that, but the dowager is ranting about needing a male heir to the throne, making Bette Davis' mom in Now Voyager seem a model of demure compassion. If Peter won't perform, surely there are good little soldiers who can get the job done --provided they can be discreet, let Peter claim paternity and let the real father ideally not be already one of the dowager's many lovers, which include-- ewww!-- John Lodge. That's earning your sable the hard way.

It should all be salacious fun, but there are too many symbols, the film is choked with them: endless horses marching tediously along by the hundreds past the camera (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras"); dehumanizing intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit"); Vaseline-lensed nature shots; lockets falling gently down the length of vast fir trees; interminable liturgies droned in candle-lit churches (enough grand high Orthodox Christian processions to bore even Eisenstein); endless ringing bells; and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at every turn. Sure, those sculptures are awesome but still, this may be the most staid, stuffy, boring film that ever included shots of topless women being flogged and branded. If not for Lodge's low-key, strangely modern performance in the handsome lover role we might never feel, for a second, a moment of human realness. He's like the first cool person we meet at a strange school.

I imagine one day, if the right restoration comes along (in Blu-ray remaster rather than the high-contrast Criterion DVD we currently have - nice as that is), all that fussy Von Sternberg lighting over those rippling swaths of sable will finally pay off. For now we can only get the occasional glimmers of highlight along the sheer black - elsewhere it's just a black dark blob. But I'm sure he put it there, Josef was crazy as Masoch over that shit.

Still, high contrast and a reliance on historical montage or no, if you're in the right frame of mind (the kind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic sex of Franco or Rollin, for example) you might forgive Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and dig how Peter's drilling holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian panky reflects  JVS' own predilection for the peeping camera. Then you can sponge up the aesthetic gloom overkill and just lean back and watch Dietrich the actress seem to age quicker than her character does over the course of the film thanks to (based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry) the cruelty he inflicted on his icy, incompetent star. She starts the film gorgeous as she was in the first films--Morocco, Shanghai Express--and ends with the hardness of feature we get in her subsequent films. Indeed. her face in the final shot--wild eyed and triumphant in white--clanging the bells after storming the palace (forever)--is terrifying--it should have been the last image in their collaboration, but instead there was The Devil is a Woman next, a film in which Dietrich overacts as a Spanish peasant gold-digger mining Lionel Atwill--it looks gorgeous but the oversize hair combs are horrid and with her fake tan and brassy overacting, she's almost 50s Crawford-level shrill. The old glowing Dietrich starts out broken in Devil - we have no idea what Atwill or Romero sees in her. Watching it today, you can tell it was Scarlet that broke her. Dietrich seems to age five years for every one of Catherine's.

Still, if you watch closely during the big wedding scene you can see the same painterly glistening and angles on the face of Dresser that Von Sternberg gave to Dietrich in certain scenes of Dishonored. But by the end of the film Dresser is dead and Dietrich isn't the wide-eyed super cool innocent hipster super-seductress anymore (and certainly not the overly wide-eyed hammy innocent, way too gorgeous and reverently-lit for an inexperienced ingenue), but a steely woman with the ability to freeze her face in a malevolent 'chaotic neutral' smile and a slowly-but-inexorably developing knack for a more raucous kind of comedy that would find its post-code place, finally, in Destry Rides Again. 

LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT

1933 - ***1/2

"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigar-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike a boxier version of famed sewing circle ringleader Mercedes De Acosta (lover of Garbo, below right). It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives new inmate Barbara Stanwyck and, though she never came out of the closet publicly, it's interesting to find Babs semi-mocking an alleged fellow sewing circle sister onscreen. But at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented at Warner Brothers, where butch masseuses and flaming tailors (such as a recently restored scene of one taking Cagney's measurements in PUBLIC ENEMY) were winked at and cajoled but never taunted or humiliated, which is at least more than they'd get after the code, when they'd have to just disappear even deeper back into the closet until Hollywood could peer over Fellini's shoulder to learn what to do with them.

Mercedes De Acosta - right / Dyke in LADIES - left

But were speaking of LADIES. The bulk of this snappy prison film deals with a love affair between gang moll Babs and moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster), the kind where each has to continually top the other in self-sacrifice and scathing honesty. He gets her off after she's busted as a bank job accessory, so she confesses she was really guilty, to burn him. He sends her to the joint, so she gets even by tearing up all his pleas to let him help her get paroled. Dan's terminal earnestness is all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters, but they give Stanwyck full license for two-fisted shots at the chin of numb-nuts patriarchy, the same target Sharon Stone aimed for in Basic Instinct but never really shattered the jaw of with Babs' same level of affinity (Stone seemed to try to be what Babs just was). Coolest of all is how the huge gaggle of female convicts are (a few exceptions aside) all friends; the bull-ettes are nice if you behave. Hell, this women's jail seem almost like Vassar, but when Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that, after the lights go out, things have gotten pretty desperate.

THE BARBARIAN

1933 - **1/2

It’s one of those films that could only have been made in the pre-code era at MGM, the studio who had the hardest time being truly subversive and often wound up just kinky and vaguely racist instead. Egyptian guide Emil (Ramon Navarro) begins the film saying a tearful good-bye to a rich white European tourist lady on the outgoing Cairo train, and then affixes himself to an incoming British socialite played by Myrna Loy. She's contemptuous and somewhat bitchy/imperialist but nowhere near as bad as her future Brit mother-in-law. Naturally, it being MGM, miscegenation would be out of the question, totally unallowable. Unless... hmmm except that she has some Middle Eastern blood, like her mother's side, some eastern branch royalty with a "family tree a mile long" maybe that's okay (though even that would be out for the post-codes). This was to be the genealogy then, of a lot of (white) socialites visiting Egypt who catch the eye of skulking Arabs in the pre-code era. Here Loy has an Egyptian mother (or rather 'had' - they're always dead, saving any social awkwardness amongst the white side of the family). In Egypt to visit her indefatigably British fiancee (Reginald Denny), his unbearably controlling mater (Blanche Friderici) and--luckily for this slightly half-caste debutante--Metro's king of 'harrumph' C. Aubrey Smith (lower left) as a more understanding pater. Clearly MGM is nudging its caravan along the same path trod by a pair of 1932 miscegenation fantasy hits, Universal's THE MUMMY and Columbia's BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. But it's still MGM and therefore falls woefully short of Universal's lurid expressionism or even Columbia's humanist handball. Still, the pyramids are superbly evoked and the whole scene is alive with rear screen magic.

The plot, on the other hand, is straight out of a bad romance novel and there's way too much Egyptian being spoken one presume phonetically once she's off the reservation as it were. First Emil first worms his way into her flower-choked hotel room via offers of service as a guide, enduring the casual cruelties he's subjected to at the hands of the lordly British, and then turning the tables once he abducts her into the desert (where it's revealed he's a slumming prince). If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO desert to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of GENERAL YEN, well then you've seen a lot of these movies, so you'll have no problem realizing the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene is slightly sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or he will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders. But he won't be, you knew that, right? He'll go on to half-heartedly croon through his pages of romantic moon-gazing nonsense. The desert moon beckons and one thing MGM does right here, is to let the prince win. "He'll kill her!" shouts the Brits when they realize Emil has spirited Diana off once again; "oh no he won't," says the more liberal aunt. If they weren't still laboring under the idea they could make Nararro another Valentino (or that anyone in the pre-code era even wanted one), he's surely have to die for love, for the sins of loving not wisely but too well, and always seeming like he realizes the best way to hide the fact he doesn't even believe his own sincerity is to go through the Egyptian moon poetry in a kind of half-asleep trance. Still, if you're a fan of stock types singing Arab songs in front of rear screen projection deserts and hazy flocks of camels wafting around the pyramids, then you'll love it, as I mostly do.  

Erich taunts his wife with Adolphe's love letters

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

1931 - **

British officer Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as the 'other man' who loves nymphomaniac Lily Damita in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga set partly in London, partly in Paris, partly in India, and always squarely on the MGM backlot. The best parts are in the beginning with porcelain collector Erich Von Stroheim as nymphomaniac Damita's aesthete husband, lolling languidly in the surf of her lover Adolphe Menjou's discomfort upon realizing his lame opera alibi won't wash (he got the title wrong). It turns out Erich's not mad; he's expecting these things. His habit is to blackmail his errant wife's many lovers, charging Menjou a whopping $10,000 because "porcelain is... expensive."

Though porcelain collecting seems a rather insipid hobby for a man like Von Strohieim, we root for him all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence. Like Novarro was a Valentino MGM were hoping Damita could be a kind of earthy Garbo. She can be charming in the right lighting, but when she's not 'on' her A-game she radiates a restless peevishness, like she's been kept waiting on the hot set all day and is tired of being prodded and mussed by the make-up lady and it's the tenth take. Nice legs, though. And a nice racket for Erich. Too bad another of Damita's lovers (Lawrence Olivier) later tries to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings). This all proves a sufficient climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps everyone out on the curb after weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh wot? his shrewish wife boots the men out onto the street, for conformity's sake. In short, it's a lot of familiar (for the era) love triangle business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips and alleged sex appeal. Better we should have followed Erich von Stroheim's porcelain, to the floor... in shards!

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

1932 - **1/2

Divorce--still scandalous, risque and oh-so progressive--was enough of a subject for entire films back in 1932, even at the already risque and progressive Warner Brothers. Here novelist Julian (George Brent) pesters newly-divorced (rich) socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage. Ick! She wants to have a little fun in Paris first but secretly wants him to come out and pester her, presumably. Trouble is, Brent always presumes. In every role he's ever played, he ignores women's attempts to evade him, wading in to range, nose first.  I despise him on principle--his whole attitude reflects the gateway rationalization of many a stalker. If he likes you, you're his. Your opinion is decided for you. You're a girl - you like a man to take charge. After all, who are you to bust up a beautiful, inevitable romance? Meanwhile, as Chatterton talks on the phone from Paris, her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis tries to steal Julian away, but in a Midge kind of semi-joking manner that never works in movies, until maybe the very end (unless the man you're stealing is Frank Sinatra).

What's so fascinating this time around is the idea that ex-married couples can still be friends and look out for each other. Ruth's middle-aged investment broker ex-husband starts losing his clients once he's seen snoozing the night away at the ritzy clibs he's regularly dragged out to by his energetic, younger Paris Hilton-esque trophy wife. Chatterton comes back to NYC and throws her weight around to keep his business afloat, rather than marrying the sappy and saccharine Brent, who's fond of purring bad lines like, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette?" like it's the cleverest most sincerely romantic string of words ever uttered. Sister Bette Davis' dialogue is, on the other hand, pretty smart, and the issues of marriage and divorce are rather adultly presented. Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE) directs with plenty of that old WB pepper but there's only so much you can do with material this thin. No sooner has the bitchy new young wife announced she's pregnant but doesn't want to keep the baby (since it would ruin her figure), she's instantly killed in a car wreck, but at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936), and I mean that as a compliment.

Skeeved by an Asian: THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, SHANGHAI EXPRESS, BROKEN BLOSSOMS, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, FU MANCHU, etc.

In the early pre-code 1930s the Asian menace was a hot topic. China was in a bloody civil war; newsreel scenes of exotic people in various states of distress brought the mystery of the orient into movie audience's laps; 'miscegenation' fantasies popped up, always proportionate in intensity to the the fantasizing culture's racism. The white male viewer was presumably all alight with lust for the beautiful Asian ladies they saw, whether via the exotica-betrothed Theda Bara or Myrna Loy in Asian make-up. Before she hit it big in The Thin Man Loy was the go-to girl for scheming Asian honeys, in pre-codes like Mask of Fu Manchu, Thirteen Women, and The Barbarian (where she often got around the miscegenation by being half-"Other"). Even today audiences who should know better, like myself, are ever-aswoon over Loy a-shimmer in shining silks, but she's reflecting an evil double standard: white man + Asian girl = sexy; Asian man + white girl = censors and southern markets no likee!

With every double standard like this comes suspicion. If the entitled American white straight male viewer is all agog over the (Hollywood amped) exotica of this beautiful half-Asian girl, imagining her Sadean-skill in inflicting kinky pleasure-pain and her complete freedom from the suffocation of western bourgeois 'morality,' he must naturally, inescapably, worry his wife is being seduced in turn by some handsome, smooth-skinned, erudite Asian man, like Nils Asther in Asian make-up in the complex, beautiful yet ultimately frustrating Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). Without that corresponding anxiety over the vice versa, the white man's fantasy is inert, and so the spiral tightens, autoerotically, to blackout.

The celestial Hal Eriksen notes of Bitter Tea:

"The one scene that everyone remembers takes place during one of Stanwyck's fevered dreams, in which she imagines Yen as a Fu Manchu-type rapist, who then melts into a gentle, courtly suitor. Directed with the exotic aplomb of a Josef von Sternberg by the usually down-to-earth Frank Capra, The Bitter Tea of General Yen was unfortunately a box office failure, due in great part to its miscegenation theme (this was still 1933). Even so, the film was chosen as the first attraction at the new Radio City Music Hall."

Yes, what about that miscegenation theme? Speaking of 1933 (arguably the greatest year ever for Hollywood) one can feel in its prohibition-repealed euphoria that the racist angle is being stretched to its limits in Yen, backing the censor up just a few inches with each assault, until gradually, if not for the damned Breen-enforced new code in 1934, Capra might have slowly been pushed racism back across state lines. At least in his film you can feel the sheer stupidity of miscegenation codes come full flower, practically baiting the intolerant bourgeois 'moralists' into getting pundit-level furious. Capra's film dares to present the forbidden love of Stanwyck and Manchu general Asther as preferable to the disposable British missionary fiancee, even if said forbidden love 'can never be.'

Abducted and given a beautiful room in his summer palace, Babs becomes enamored of the spring moon and the sight of Chinese lovers frolicking in the fronds, even if they are just soldiers and concubines (in order to not be shocked, she probably presumes they're all legally married before vanishing into the bushes together). Meanwhile her own sexuality is at stake; her letters back to her fiancee are misdirected by the treacherous Mai-Li (the Japanese actress Toshia Mori), Asher's young local girl lover, who resents having to sit lower than everyone else at the dinner table. Yen is foolish enough to listen to Bab's pleas of mercy for Mai-Lin's life when a different betrayal is discovered, and its this mercy that costs Yen his kingdom, fortune and leads to his bitter tea-drinking. A white woman's naive pro-life soap boxing is the end of him, like Joseph Breen looming over Asther with a glass of poison, like they did to poor Elisha Cook Jr. in THE BIG SLEEP!

It's fascinating and kind of appalling that even though the general is played by a white man, even a kiss on the lips with the white Babs is forbidden. Similarly, a later Stanwyck vehicle, the Furies' (1950), presents a romance between a Mexican man and Barbara that leads to a bitter hanging early on even though he's Gilbert Roland, a white man given the most meagre of tan make-ups and nothing happens between them, either.  In Yen a kiss happens kind of but only in the Fu Manchu-cum-handsome prince monster dream sequence. "They found a love they dared not touch," read the tag line, but it's rather Columbia who dared not; Yen is down to touch that love BUT is also a gentleman, so she has to want to come to him, and then even if she does she's eventually unable to actually kiss more than his hand in fealty. When Babs even thinks about kissing him, dream or no, she's repulsed. 

One of my favorite critics, David Thomson, gives the film the benefit of the doubt, racism-wise, interpreting Stanwyck's missionary coldness as the result of external metatextual echoes of Capra's smitten advances. They had dated for their first three Columbia pictures and she had broken it off and he remained lovelorn. Thompson thinks he cast her in Yen to try and win her back:

"So Stanwyck tries to be the missionary when everything in the film calls for a creeping abandon in Megan. When I say everything I mean above all Nils Asther's Yen, one of the most attractive figures in early sound cinema--witty, fatalistic, and very smart." ("Have You Seen..." p. 99)

Of course Yen can't be that smart if he lets his attraction for another man's naive bride get in the way of his war, since it means he'll lose it. His fascination is a slow suicide from the moment she first offers him a handkerchief after he runs over her rickshaw driver. He doesn't care about the rickshaw driver because "life, even at it's best, is hardly endurable" - a great line he delivers with the perfect mix of ennui and breeziness - but he's moved she gives him a handkerchief even after berating him for his callousness. He sees in her something that if he follows it through will lead to his death, but hey, life's hardly endurable. Yen adopts her forgiving attitude towards the treacherous Mai Lin almost on a dare and, while he handles the subsequent loss of his fortunes with Zen aplomb, he can't really handle the strait-jacket of the production code (who could?) which results in Babs' surrendering to Yen in penance yet still unable to think about kissing him without recoiling as if he was still the leering Fu Manchu character from her dream. She loves him but his non-whiteness ensures she'll never convert him back into that masked prince.

This repulsion and lust see-saw between beautiful white women and hormonal Chinese warlords was prevalent all over the years 1930-33, and so it's no surprise one shows up in a 1932 Josef Von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich film: Shanghai Express. White actor Warner Oland (who also played both Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu in the same approx. era) hijacks the title train and won't let her man, a stodgy Brit officer played by sleepy Clive Brook go until Dietrich agrees to becomes his mistress. She will, because she's heroic, but it's implied that this would be a fate worse than death. Luckily Anna May Wong stabs him in a race-appropriate act of post-rape retribution before this miscegenation fantasia gets any farther. And the censor wipes his brow in relief.

Shangai Express by Erich Kuersten - 2008 

Wong and Dietrich are upscale prostitutes in the film, so it's presumed Dietrich has slept with Chinese generals before, but as long as we don't have to see it, or know about it, I guess it's okay (don't ask don't tell). She says she's reformed. But Oland takes Anna May Wong into his makeshift train station boudoir as consolation, not asking permission, thus justifying her deux ex machina stabbing as he's packing to leave. Apparently sex with an Asian man is hardly endurable... even if he's actually white and you're the only female star in Hollywood who's actually Asian!

Anna May Wong played another 'entertainer' who felt this way, the previous year, in in the 1931 Fu Manchu sequel Daughter of the Dragon. Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa plays a smitten detective who starts presuming that, since he's young and Asian and so is she, he can dictate who her friends are and make all sorts of won't-take-the-hint advances. Wong prefers the rich white guy, of course, even if she means to kill him eventually and even if he's played by Bramwell Fletcher, an Englishman so twee he makes David Manners seem like Marlon Brando. We're meant, I think, to be a little repulsed by Haywakawa and simultaneously to secretly root for Wong's plans of vengeance agains the Petries, and to identify with the sense of love and duty she feels for her infamous father. We'd hate to see her throw away her happiness with this stiff Uncle Tom of an Asian detective, and Fletcher's even worse, a slice of limp white bread falling over on itself. Anna meanwhile can have any white man she wants, as they're all beguiled, though of course its understood none of them would ever marry her, other than the dregs of the dance card, a man of her own race, and a cop no less.

The fear of course was that seeing a love scene involving a young Asian male with another woman, even an Asian woman, would lead to riots and lynchings and burning of the nitrate in the southern markets. Censorship pre-empted the crackers' pre-emptive strike against nonwhites, lest as Fu Manchu urges his throngs in Mask of Fu Manchu (1933), they "kill the white man, and take his women!" It's the sort of roundabout self-hatred that makes the white people in that film so much more contemptible than even Fu Manchu and his evil daughter. One can't fault the latter for having a grudge against the white race if only from the contemptible racism displayed by the character within the film itself (their feeling that Asians have no right to their own art treasures, for example, because Britishers "like to look at them on holidays." Sure Fu and company want the treasures to rally the 'yellow' race against white civilization, but to deny him access to them is not unlike the censors' own denying of any possible riot stirring imagery.  At the end of Fu Manchu, Nayland Smith throws the riot stirring sword into the middle of the ocean rather than bringing it back for the museum and one can't help but draw the comparison with the burial of Osama bin Laden in the exact same way for for a very similar reason. One thinks too of all the edited film footage that was burned or otherwise destroyed for similar reasons too, things too progressive for their era (Paul Robeson's striking of the white cop in Emperor Jones (1933) for example, though that's been partially restored).

As someone who was almost lynched in a South Carolina two-dollar theater on a 1998 Xmas day, just for wearing a yellow sweater (the movie being In-Out and my brother and I being the only ones laughing) I can vouch that a lot of that intolerance in certain states is still very real. To these racist swine Asians are almost scarier than Hispanics, Latinos, African-Americans or Native Americans, because the derogatory phrase 'yellow' doesn't really fit. Asians are in fact 'whiter than white' - more refined than the white racist thinks even himself capable of. That's why for every exquisitely cruel and cultured monster like Manchu there must be hordes of leering Chinese soldiers or grinning, moronic cooks, often played by the versatile character Willie Fung, to make whitey feel all master race-y again.

I write this post not to stir up racist trouble.  In fact quite the opposite. I'm fascinated by the tropes of exotica, of chinoiserie -- I can't help it. The art directors involved in these 1933 films took the Asian milieu as a license to go nuts with ornate doorways, sparkling, slinky black dresses with dragons glistening down the slit skirt, Hindi deity statuary casting monstrous shadows over exquisite torture devices. I've never thought these cine-fantasias represented the real Asia, but I love their beauty and weirdness, the liberation from the sticky wickets of drab western symmetry when an art designer is allowed to go full out on the Asian opulence.

Who wouldn't lose their head over this... "possession"?

In The Cheat (1931) for example (see my review of The Universal Pre-code Collection on Bright Lights), Irving Pichel's character isn't Asian at all but a British diplomat or something ensconced in Japan or wherever for the last three years but now back at his old club, bearing tiger scars and emitting vile comments like "the oriental woman isn't a slave, she's simply been well-trained." So he's vaguely Asian if only by association with his sculpture collection, penchant for sadism, black silk pajamas, and statues branded with his seal of ownership for every sexual conquest like little awards, giving his whole playa thing a sickly sheen of reptilian self-sabotage. Bankhead promises to sleep with him if he pays her gambling debts but then when she no longer needs the cash, backs out of the deal. Pichel is plenty creepy sure, but Bankhead's stoop-shouldered, cigarette-voiced, gambling addicted, overspending old broad dowdiness isn't exactly the stuff that dreams are made of either. When he gets the spurn he brands her in reprisal. In the 1915 original film by the way, the miscegenation angle was clearer as the Pichel character was played by a real Asian, Sessue Hayakawa. By the time of this remake, even the thought of owing a real Asian any sexual favors was too loathsome to, apparently, contemplate.

The overriding motif throughout these films is that Asians are treated with some respect if they are cultured and can speak English, though they tend to go all to blazes when they get a load of any white chick. Apparently even if played by whites, and given British names, guys into Asian culture are still so repulsive that being literally branded on the breast is better than putting out, regardless of your word of honor.

The sordid Asian lustiness was all over the silent era, while the earliest and most influential chaste interracial romance of them all is surely that between horribly abused Lillian Gish and the disillusioned Asian curio shop owner played by white man Richard Barthelmess in Broken Blossoms (1919). Chris Jacobs writes "it is a delicate story of characters and ideals caught up in an inexorable destiny.  Modern-day critics who acknowledge Griffith's contribution to cinema also find the eloquent plea for racial tolerance less embarrassing to embrace than the controversial The Birth of a Nation." Yeah but as I recall they never even kiss or embrace despite this poster:


Nowadays of course racism is still a problem. But may I suggest that a part of this is the prevalence of the attitude that we are all the same? I applaud kids who get way into the minutiae of another culture, even ironically... this is how racism is healed, through admittance into one's own lexicon. The purpose of making fun of something can be to join it, to playfully analyze and encompass it. How many best friends didn't like each other at first, indeed mocked each other's mannerisms? But drawn to the unique complimentary energy the other provided during their inevitable fights, insults, or misunderstandings, special bonds are formed? It's well known now that, contrary to racist ideology, mixed race children are actually genetically superior to many purebreds. The bigger the gene pool for your DNA to work from the less likely you are to have birth defects and the more likely you are to be beautiful, as per books on the subject, such as Breeding Between the Lines.

We should rejoice when our children start dating someone of a different race. The best thing we can do is to mix our genes and absorb all the details of each other's culture, celebrating each other's unique perspectives, the prelude to which is nearly always to mock, probe, and burlesque said differences. The sooner we're all one glorious carmel-skinned, mildly epicanthically-folded race the better... as far as our genes are concerned, especially. In the meantime we should try on each other's cultures like robes at a costume party, and in the process de-demonize ourselves to each other. Films like Bitter Tea can be accused of racism or copping out on miscegenation but they also open up the dialogue. They point out the withering hypocrisy at the core of the anti-miscegenation code and its ultimate damage to world culture the same way homophobia in later stretches of Brokeback Mountain later would.

When we feel denied the right to objectify, imitate, adopt or consume a differing culture, isn't that also a kind of racism? Instead it's more likely we react and form opinions based on personal experience: we may go through a faux-Rastafari phase as a college kid then get mugged on a trip to Jamaica for spring break and get all racist all of a sudden, burning our Peter Tosh albums in moot reprisal, as if the two had anything to do with one another. Let's learn the lesson of our fascination with exotica, and let's let the tortured sprits of conveniently killed characters like General Yen point out the absurdity of Hollywood's censor system, an outmoded code which encourages Montague-Capulet divisiveness even as it portends to delve into sensitive issues of star-crossed lovers separated by chasms of culture who are destroyed by the very divisiveness the code encourages. Demanding credit for putting out a fire they themselves lit is no more than Munchausen by-proxy racism.

The devil falls in love with those that won't be tempted.

Rod La Rocque, you were just born in the wrong century! (THE LOCKED DOOR - 1929)

I've been going nuts with my new DVD recorder, and burning my way through the recent flurry of pre-code Stanwycks on TCM. One maligned but lovely item - THE LOCKED DOOR (1929), one of Babs' first major speaking roles, sticks out not because of her performance, particularly, but because of Rod La Rocque as the requisite debauched, womanizing cad!

The only review I could find of LOCKED online is from Dennis Schwartz who rates it a C:

The melodrama suffers from the static, stage-like look of early sound movies; it was a time when how to use sound was first being developed and still had many kinks to be worked out. Decades later when Stanwyck became a Hollywood legend, she was asked about The Locked Door and quipped: “They never should’ve unlocked the damned thing.”

There's no denying its got its "kinks" but I've got a soft spot a mile deep for these old early creaks and hisses. That crude sound is an ear into a bygone age, far more bygone than just a year or so later, when sound caught up with itself and we could no longer hear the air or marvel at the sopping wet letters and telegrams. LOCKED DOOR is clearly a 'filmed play' and probably originally done on a bi-level trick stage, the kind where actors weaving in and out of closets and unlocked doors to hide from one another. They got that a lot in those days, especially for old dark house mysteries and bed-hopping farce. Here we have a little of both: the old dark art deco-gothic house redecorated as a giant bachelor apartment (danger, maidens!) vs. the spacious pre-war (as in Civil) mansion all stuffed with flowers and marble for multi-generations of family to worry about their honor in. With such a fuss made about who was photographed where and with whom we get a glimpse of a whole way of life that would be eradicated when the boys came home after the Next World War and found outdated morality waiting for them back at their multi-generational homes; they left in droves and moved into prefabricated worlds of the future where they could have sex all the time without small town gossip. The 'burbs, baby! Now you know the whole story. 

In these early sound films however, the importance of outdated, choking morality was still the stuff of woman's pictures, which were huge at the time (I'm reading Thomas Doherty's excellent Pre-Code Hollywood right now, so consider him referenced), and most of the plots revolve around vicious old bats running free-loving hotties out of town--or, if the film is set in the city, avenging the honor of so-and-so's daughter. That's the angle of THE LOCKED DOOR, which has for its centerpiece an extended scene in louche La Roque's swanky bi-level bachelor pad, where the blackmailed Babs goes to retrieve a compromising picture (which Rod holds over her head in exchange for a tryst). See, Stanwyck was once (almost) taken advantage of by La Roque on an "outside the legal limit" party boat (all the rage during Prohibition) and the pair had their picture taken while running off the boat during a police raid (when the boat drifted inside the limit).  The picture includes indications her dress is torn, and she's hiding under Rod's overcoat. But she can explain! 

Our story picks up years later where she's wealthy and married to some taciturn duffer played by the soon-to-be-dead-from-drugs William Boyd. Rod's bought the pic to keep it out of the papers, but figures it may come in handy, when he gets real horny.

Granted, La Rocque may be the villain, but he's hilarious fun, refusing to be pigeonholed into the role of a mere mustache-twirling cad. One can imagine Monroe Owsley or Conrad Nagel in this part being just tedious, but La Rocque will have none of their mewling surliness! No catalogue of sniveling blackmailer signifiers, he! Unabashedly tall and fey, completely at ease in his body and with the then-new trappings of sound - more so than Babs at the time (though she would have the hang of it by 1931's TEN CENTS A DANCE), Rod's having a grand time.

I've never really soaked him up before, but he has a great Vincent Price-meets-Cary Grant macho fey vibe, contrasting his huge rows of teeth and ungainly tallness handled with a dancer's nimble grace and unabashedly feline purr of a voice. Whereas Babs and the rest of the cast seem to be acting out a drawing room drama, hitting their marks and speaking... clearly... and stagey, La Rocque is living his role, and his sexual ease is eye-popping. He's a complex three-dimensional villain, radiating the seductive humor and "owning my own un-okayness" of a man whose love of premarital sex, drinking, and debauchery is very anathema to its stodgy time and--rather than give them up to fit in-- he just gives up all pretense of 'decency' (yet is truly decent when push comes to shove, unlike the more surface decent folks around him, who would rather shoot a man than lose to him). Hell, when the moral code of the time is this repressed, it's almost a true free spirit's sworn duty to buck it, a lesson that prohibition was making clear to everyone).

Also worth noting is Rod's dishy rapport with his old valet (the incomparably named George Bunny), whom he treats as a co-conspiratorial equal rather than a master. A mix of Leporello from DON GIOVANNI and a faux-shocked reprobate uncle in a Phillip Barrie play, Bunny is the icing on the cake!

Proving further Rod has the truest moral code in the whole play/film, the ending has him even clearing all the suspects of his own murder, via death bed statement exonerating the guilty patriarchs around him; it's not that he fancies himself at all a knight, but as if he feels truky sorry for these uptight socialites for whom a whiff of scandal is so horrific that they run around beating people up, waving guns, pleading and hiding corpses, just to avoid a casual sexual hook-up. Better a murder than a quickie for these 'moral' types- and that is punishment enough for them. In this liberated, loosey-goosey attitude, Rod all but screams "Jesus, maybe y'all wouldn't have had to shoot me if you would all just get laid once in awhile and shut up about it!" 

Amen, Rod, that's real morality, and in just a 40 years or so you'd be a man of your time.

Rod (in bed, where else), looking and acting ten feet tall.