White Woman Waterloo: WEST OF SHANGHAI, JAMAICA INN, SKYSCRAPER SOULS

It's been my personal experience (and its obviously informed by Hollywood) that (single white, straight upper/middle class) European, Canadian, and South American women are, sexually-speaking how American (ala the USA) women are only on Halloween and New Year's Eve (unless they are outside US borders, or drunk), and if that makes no sense to you then you never noticed how in Guys and Dolls Jean Simmons is a quintessentially American girl, dumb enough to initially cut handsome Brando loose since he's not exactly the square dude she's fantasized about as a child, yet she's able to loosen up with a drink in her system and her system in Cuba --a double permissive whammy. South American and European women tend to date who they like, and like sex, so it's more musical chairs than hunger artist. They do not view their sexual ballot as some kind of swing state vote for the checklist of male traits they condone. They fool around without guilt or shame, the 'walk of shame' concept is itself offensive to them in its puritan connotations. And they don't need the mutually agreed on bacchanals of uptight USA single girls, New Year's and Halloween, to let loose.

Non-American women know that if Brando's gambling addiction doesn't meet their expectation of good Sky Masterin' then that's their problem, not MGM's and not Skye's. For European and South American women (a sweeping generalization I know, forgive me) the idea of sexual behavior not 'counting' on certain nights or under certain moons, seems like an infantile workaround of a distinctly Puritan problem. What are American women --in films and in NYC in trendier circles of dating particularly--waiting for? Do they so believe the ads and code-enforced mores their heads are saturated with that they feel they must hold out for Mr. Right? Do they really believe in princes with lots of money and no vices just waiting for them to round the corner, waiting to say 'thank god you waited.'? 

The question pre-code (and post-code sometimes) Hollywood loves to ask though, remains: Why are dull-as-dishwater Christian-mingling "white women" from the USA so highly prized amongst "the Orientals" (sic) --when it's so clear that white American straight Christian (missionary) women are shallow, self-entitled and sanctimonious and as 'locked up' in their nether regions as Fort Knox? Who do they think they're fooling? 

The answer to this mystery is so vile only the lewdest of prude censors can even imagine it. As the well-laid writers amuse themselves tying sexually embittered censors up in knots with these miscegenation fantasias and did they-or-didn't they fade outs on mid-afternoon naps, getting away with murder in the margins by conjuring llewd Chinese slavers under every innocent cherry blossom Stanwyck wafts by, A parade of gibbering slavering stereotype foreign men traipse past the windows of our innocent missionary figures. Beautiful Asian odalisques abound, but even the boxiest of sexless white woman is to die for. She beats them all! Is it because her repressed id/sexuality is so bottled up the only way she can uncork is via some loathsome heathen having his way by force? Is that what the censors think? 

This missionary's wife, then, becomes the censor stand-in, a figure MGM supposes is worthy of lionization and trust, but the writers conjuring her sneer at even while filling her ample diaphragm with florid dialogue. The result? A whole new front of masochism, since Hollywood demands the heathens die for the sin of even trying to bust a move. Even played--as they inevitably are--by a white man, a single kiss on a white girl's lips will topple an empire, or cause riots south of the Mason-Dixon line.

By which I mean, TCM recently showed the always alluring and shockingly racist (it gets more odious and racist with every passing year of dawning social awareness), Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and also West of Shanghai, (1937) a film I'd never seen thanks to mediocre ratings and its post-code date, but actually it's much better at linear momentum and minutiae than the more glossily ornate and sexier, but dumber Manchu. It's even more racist, and sexist, and raunchier! No Myrna Loy though. It's still a pisser.

 Even if, like old Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), West turns out rather like Houdini drowning in a vat of water while trying to wrestle loose from the handcuffs of racist censorship, it's got a few tricks marking it different: there's a slightly gay twist courtesy the resolutely unappealing and boxy dyke vibe of the missionary object of everyone's obsession, Jane Creed (Beverly Roberts); repeated fake-out firing-squad based tests of homoerotic male bonding between General Fang (Karloff) and the dashing wildcatter Jim Hallet (Gordon Oliver); big business intricacies (business deals with revolutionaries are worthless if they don't win, and even if they do since even business laws my be temporarily subject to --heh heh--
"interpretation" during wartime); and a zig-zagging first half ripe with good screenwriting.

In some ways, it fakes out our narrative expectations better than a Tarantino movie. In the beginning it seems like it's going to be the post-code Shanghai Express:e there's the Chinese Civil War backdrop, and disparate first class passengers saying their station farewells, boarding the train and settling into compartments. We wonder what plots will cohere as the voyage is underway; will there be something about the duplicitously jolly interrelation between foreclosing banker Douglas Wood, his somewhat attractive adult daughter Lola (Sheila Bromley), and Ricardo Cortez's big oil man Gordon Creed (shades of General Died at Dawn)? But nothing stays predictable, besides the confusion of war.  The train is rerouted and suddenly they're all heading out to Jim Hallet's discovery field in the titular direction, getting accidentally caught between Karloff's existential warlord Wu Yen Fang and the well-intended but stretched-thin Chinese army (Bitter Tea of General Yen). We soon learn Creed isn't just heading west to get Hallet's oil but also visit his boxy missionary wife Jane (Roberts), who's in love with Hallet -though Hallet only has eyes for oil. Creed doesn't want her back, understandably, for a more dour and sexless thing in all of China one may not find, but damned if he's going to give her up to Hallet... unless the do a lil deal, of course. Then they're all in bed... together. 

The foreclosing banker's daughter likes Jim Hallet too, and is the better bet, in my opinion, but hey, each according to his own closeted tastes. Karloff's rebel General Fang may want them all anyway and seems most in the position to get them. He starts with Jane, using a slow boil seduction strategy that occurs over real time until we're invited to feel her mix of excitement, dread, and curiosity. How is he going to bust his move? Whatever it is, it's going to be fast, strange and unstoppable once it starts.

He's a real practiced Romeo is our Fang. Sensory bewitchment ala the "Oriental" decor, incense, music, and Fang's practiced tact makes it pretty clear that all Jane will have to do is not scream or run and she'll be in bed with an Asian by the end of the night. Accorded A-number one mistress status on account of her white skin, she'll probably be dumped off at some Peking brothel once her bloom fades, or when he finally realizes she hasn't one to begin with, it was just the novelty of her race. Gorgeous Asian women are a dime a dozen it seems, while boxy, repressed white chicks are apparently more precious than mountains of jade. 

This may be perhaps just a grass-is-greener thing, but I always wonder how long these women would stay so valuable if they weren't so damned racist, or if the censor demographic (the kind of old broads who drag Joel McCrea to that wheezy triple feature in Sullivan Travels) suddenly all dropped acid and had an orgy. But maybe it's a fantasia they cultivate through their own frigidity? Either way it's intricate business for an allegedly lurid and exciting slice of adventure hokum.

Karloff plays his general like a weird mix of Charlie Chan and Willie Fung with just the right amount of General Died at Dawn's Akim Tamiroff-style poker faced existential brinksmanship to keep it all from collapsing into high camp. As with Fu Manchu, it's Boris at half-sail but still Boris, so wondrous to behold. His Fang is subtle, sure, light-hearted and infinitely bemused, especially compared to Warner Oland's similar role in Shanghai Express, and Nils Asther's in Bitter Tea of General Yen (both 1932). 

Once could read them all as racist caricatures, but that would be narrow-minded itself. The missionary men in the women's lives don't come off much better. Most all the white characters act like hungover brats, reeking of white privilege and colonialist entitlement. At least the generals have some keen interest in displays of macho honor rather than in just pompous rank and skin color displays. For them, the measure of man is not based on skin color and social position, but how calmly he stands up to the intensity of a firing squad, or torture. If his hand isn't shaking when he lights his last cigarette, if he refuses the blindfold, and if he pontificates in typically post-WWI sardonic hipster élan about death instead of pleading like a weak-livered carpetbagger, then he's (or she's) earned respect. For a world still collectively PTSD-stricken. casual ambivalence about facing a firing squad is such a righteous mark of cool it's worth betraying your country just to get the chance. When a woman earns that same respect, ala Shanghai Lilly ("I believe a word of honor would mean something coming from you") she's elevated far above the merely ornamental HTG status of their peers.

Another reason I veddy much like West of Shanghai: despite the pidgin English, the Asian characters are actually far more complex than the whites, and (Karloff aside) played by actual Asians for a change. As Fang's #1 henchman Chester Gan brings streetwise cool to the role of an ex-pat Chicago gangster who speaks in hep cat slang; Richard Loo (the conductor on Shanghai Express) is the portly officer who christens the feisty Jane 'Little Dragon' after she takes umbrage with the way he distractedly bats her around; as a nationalist general who's killed on the train in the opening reels, Japanese actor Tetsu Komai as the decent, stately general who bonds with Gordon Creed early on. Steadied and eloquent, hes speaks in such a succinct, polite and honest style of English, clearly indicating it's a second language as spoken by an educated and intelligent person. Such a rarity it seems like he stepped in from a much realer, saner world) Happy to be in the company of so many white people he doesn't know in his first class car (they're more trustworthy than his scheming soldiers --he says), his polite dignity sets an early high water mark for dialogue and characterization that no other character in the film ever matches. His early death leaves a sad mark, as if the potential for a happy resolution for this conflict and for a much better film, is not to happen. It's a bummer and it's meant to be, for war is like that.  

The white set of passengers by contrast--white missionaries and wildcatter capitalists--are as a whole painted rather crudely. In their haughty colonialist arrogance they view the brutal civil war strife going on around them as just another Chinese excuse for slow room service. This is particularly well-drawn in the scene between Jane and Fang (Karloff) after Oliver is hauled off to the brig for punching a guard (in defending the lady's honor).

 Though Fang is seductive and charming in that seduction scene I started to mention, I should wind my way back to the frightening indication--beyond any racist simplification, that there's the clear indication she's bereft of alternatives, other than suicide or murder (via the pistol he's left on the table). "If I want," Fang says, "I take you. It veddy easy." The scene is rather chilling, and we feel the protean echo of the violent savaging women were enduring in mainland China at this approximate time (1937) at the hands of the Japanese Army.  The only way out of it is for our Androcles Oliver escapes his captors and rushes to the rescue where he's recognized by Fang for a thorn-out-the-paw favor he did back when Fang was just a wounded nobody rebel. "Phew!'

It's a pretty stilted resolution, but we're glad to be spared any further dismay over why such a slick operator would be attracted to this boxy blank broad, grateful she won't be assaulted, and grateful we can spend the rest of the film enjoying the the weird head games Fang employs as he runs along a silken edge betwixt outright menace, Solomon-style problem solving amidst his ranks and prisoners, and enough macho existential last cigarette firing squad-style coot to earn him a ladder rung between Dietrich's wiping away the young corporal's tears with the offered blindfold at the end of 1932's Dishonored (see: Decadence Lost) and Walken's "one shot" at the end of 1978's The Deer Hunter.  

SKYSCRAPER SOULS 

(1933) Dir. Edgar Selwyn

***1/3 

"A man and a wife should never live in the same house," Warren William says to his expensive absentee spouse Hedda Hopper (she comes to town only to snap $100K checks from his fingers like AA tokens). Indeed, William avoids houses altogether, living above where he works and mixing business and pleasure so seamlessly together all distinction ceases. A tycoon of towering ambition and ruthlessness, William's big ambition is a skyscraper monument to his own ego, one that dwarfs the Empire State. But. as so often happens, especially in Warren's Warner Bros. pre-codes, a white woman gonna lay him as low. Skycraper follows the blueprint of high-test William vehicles like Employee's Entrance and The Mouthpiece, mixing his brand of infectious big business wolfishness with a Little Red Riding Hood secretary or client naif waterloo as counterpoint. He falls for her and ends up going straight... usually to jail or the morgue. He can scale capitalism's summit in a bounding leap, but flash some naive integrity his way and he's in over his head. The naif here is Maureen O'Sullivan at the height of her sparkling gamin loveliness. She lays us low, just watching her climb drunkenly into his bed. Veree Teasdale, as Williams' mistress and personal assistant, is both jealous and protective of this young innocent (she runs the secretarial pool). As with all the best William films, the last chunk might be ham-handed kowtows to bumpkin decency, but the first swath is pure giddy carnal Mr. Wolf's wild ride. Usually that means an uninterrupted stretch of 'real time' at Williams' side during office hours. This time we see him problem solving and merrily bull-charging through a steady stream of assistants, clients, bankers, lovers, and the wife, all while still in his robe upstairs in his apartment: finagling investors is done in the lower level steam bath; appeasing the foreclosing bankers (after he 'borrowed' thirty million from the kitty) is done upstairs in his office; accruing endomorphic industry titan Norton (George Barbier) as a partner is done in a booze-and-babe-stocked penthouse. It all flows from day to early morning in a seamless pre-code rush. The practiced ease with which the great William lies and connives his way out of appointments with two different mistresses in order to seduce O'Sullivan, first telling her to stay late downstairs at the office and type a second copy of some report he doesn't need, then plying her with champagne upstairs--only to have her hang onto the less intimidating jolly old prospective client Norton!

Hmmm.... one can't just cockblock a desired investor outright, but that doesn't stop a big bad wolf like William. Just means he has to be extra conniving...

Feeling as if it's unfolding in total real time from the moment we see the peak-of-pixiedom Maureen (that sexy frock at left rivaling her deerskin Tarzan and his Mate) in the workday afternoon all the way through to him walking her out of the building in the early dawn, his catch-and-release seduction is so pure pre-code, so truly sophisticated and lecherous it rivals only a similar film (clearly a blueprint for this one), The Mouthpiece.

ALAS, this isn't Warners, this is MGM, so these reels of seamless business-during-pleasure fusion are offset by a lame working class romance in the lobby coffee shop and elevator, i.e.. the usual MGM bow to the sort of provincial moralism and hick sentiment that scrappy Warner Brothers or champagne and opium Paramount had expunged from their psyches when they moved into the sound age. 

In this case the 'decent guy' after O'Sullivan down in the lobby is a pushy little adenoidal mouth breather played by Norman Foster. One of the most annoyingly 'romantic' Madison Avenue-style ground floor lovers ever (an antecedent to Elliot Reid in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) he's a type that's thankfully disappeared long ago from the national register of romantic male archetypes: the smug, overbearing ad man, pipe in mouth, granting himself the innate right to annoy cute girls at their place of work. This would only be tolerable if he wound up arrested, served with a restraining order, or barred from the building, but his overbearing come-ons actually work on Maureen, which seems to condone boorish stalker behavior in a very unhealthy way (1). He actually stopped me from watching the rest of the movie on two separate occasions. Thank God I finally just realized I could FF past his scenes without missing a goddamn thing (though even I don't like to see his life's savings lost in stock rush boondoggle).

The rest of the 'vertical Grand Hotel'-ish cast includes Jean Hersholt as a Jewish (vot else?) fashion designer smitten by one of his 'party girl' models (Anita Page). At least he's smart enough to not lose every cent of his money in the same boondoggle that wipes out Foster.

Guess who makes a killing on that same boondoggle? Damn right.

JAMAICA INN

(1939) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

****

Our final oversize capitalist brinksmanship-swindler torpedoed by an innocent white girl gamin is the great Charles Laughton in Hitchcock's unjustly sidelined JAMAICA INN (1939). Cursed with decades of terribly murky prints, it was hard to tolerate no matter how stout the Hitchcock seafarer, that is... until last week when it showed up on TCM finally looking drop dead gorgeous in a cleaned-up new HD deep black transfer which made me instantly forget the dismally depressing time I had trying to watch it on public domain VHS over the last few decades. This new transfer is so good, by jove, I've changed my whole costume drama tune (I used to hit 'stop' at the first sight of petticoats, tricornered hats or powdered wigs, 'ceptin on rare occasions as it were, sonny). It looked so good on TCM that I put the Cohen BFI Blu-ray on my bleedin' Xmas wish list and started shouting "Chadwick!" in a worshipful impression of Charles Laughton as the British gentry/local constable. Unfolding over a few dark nights, set on a big tract of foreboding moors and cliffs along the windswept Irish (?) coast near the titular inn (a more Gothically delicious set-up you'll never find), it's basically yet another tale of an innocent beauty bringing her antiquated morality to bear upon a scene in which she is but a tourist and in the process felling some smitten tyrant or other, but it's far different in tone than the other two in this list. The wreckers at work here are genuinely evil--a truly murderous bunch of cretins--and in this case the beauty is a very young Maureen O'Hara in her first film. Who wouldn't choose to topple?

 

The stormy adventure eventually coheres into an extended thrilling chase as Maureen is pursued all over the adjoining properties, sea caverns, roofs, mansions, hills and dales, providing a fine example of Hitchcock's ever-evolving flair for  comedically-leavened suspense. What I remember most though is the genuinely fine mix of unique character actors as the wrecking crew, so full of rich slangy elocution and colloquial dialogue they rival of the unsavory crew of MGM"s 1935 classic Treasure Island (a personal favorite), none more than the crazy-eyed and haired Leslie Banks as Maureen's uncle-in-law. And, as might be supposed, Laughton--sneakily oscillating between gluttonous British lord swagger and conniving, homicidal greed--is at his nimblest, toying with O'Hara and the role as if a cat eager to make a mouse continually think it's almost gotten away. And for her part it soon cuts both ways: initially letting her woman's trust in signifiers of paternal power get the better of her, she comes around when it counts. Plucky, warm, brave, going to any length to save lives, even that of the no-good uncle-in-law (Banks) on account of her devoted aunt (Marie Ney), she practically leaps off the page of the screen, a fiction heroine of our imagination come to robust life. Now that there's a restoration wherein we can savor the beauty of the coastline and the deep horror film / mischief-night ambience, the dirty faces of the wreckers and the shadowy corners of the rooms, Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn has become a sploshing wave of thrilling old dark inn suspense, lovers-on-the-run mystery, colorful black comedy, and ripping action - jolly good show. And--what's this here? Could it be? Robert Newton is the romantic hero? Well strike me colors and call me ChadWICK!

NOTES:
1. see CinemArchetype 2: The Skeevy Boyfriend.
2. My father always said he originally wanted to name me Chadwick, but my mom stopped him.

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.