I am tempted to describe Daughter of Shanghai (1937) as the future that liberals want, except that it's part of the past and it's so important not to forget that.
In fairness to its genre, I would not consider it cheating to recommend this movie on its pulp merits alone. Written by Gladys Unger and Garnett Weston and directed for Paramount by avant-garde émigré Robert Florey, it runs an economical 62 minutes and uses every trick in the B-picture book to keep its audience entertained from its bamboo-screened opening credits to its extra-American punch line—violent death and stock footage, two-fisted action and newspaper montages, sex appeal and heel face turns and rear projection and romance. There's a deadly seaplane and a pocket MacGuffin. There are contract players and an excruciatingly tense phone call negotiated by a man bound hand and foot. The protagonists fight crime in accidental parallel, going independently undercover with the same international gang only to meet again with life-threatening awkwardness in a tropical dive bar off the coast of Central America. And in 1937, in a year when the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in full force, when Warner Oland was playing Charlie Chan and Peter Lorre was playing Mr. Moto and Boris Karloff was playing Mr. Wong, the stars of this wild, intermittently topical-political ride are the Chinese-American Anna May Wong and Korean-American Philip Ahn and it makes a hell of a welcome change.
Too late for a pre-Code and too early for film noir, Daughter of Shanghai nonetheless shares for me some of their matter-of-fact subversion: it feels transgressive simply for representing something closer to the reality of the world. It's not a prestige picture carefully constructed to ease a white audience into sympathy with its marginalized protagonists by stressing their assimilation or their respectability or their model minority exceptionalism. It's a second-string programmer with all the limitations and latitude that implies; its budget stretches just about as far as dressing the sets from the director's own art collection and it drops its girl detective and its G-man into exactly the same serial-peril shenanigans that befall white protagonists in crime adventures all the time and merrily watches them go. It can't be overlooked that, as if to head off the specters of dual loyalty or perpetual foreignness, their heroism is in service of the enforcement of American immigration laws, smashing a ring of "smugglers" whose undeclared cargo is human. Despite the presence of sensationally racist headlines like "Foreign Horde Floods U.S.," however, the script's burden of villainy is clearly shown to rest not with the brutally exploited immigrants but with the traffickers who profit from their desperation and even their deaths, extorting their living contraband at every step of the journey only to cynically dispose of them if the authorities get too close, and not once is this transnational problem presented as the protagonists' especial duty to solve because of their race. Special agent Kim Lee (Ahn) was sent out from Washington not because the smuggled aliens are overwhelmingly Asian, but because he's one of the top men in his field, introduced with a front-page profile in the San Francisco Herald that subtitles his not misleadingly dapper portrait "Crack Agent for U.S. Bureau of Investigation." Wong's Lan Ying Quan, meanwhile, enters the amateur detecting racket through the time-honored motive of justice denied: her father Quan Lin (Chingwah Lee) was a prominent and beloved importer of Chinese antiques who refused a strong-arm offer of illegal, unpaid labor and for his scruples was murdered in a hijacked taxi before he could get to the Feds with what he knew. "I've seen how the authorities handle things," Lan Ying declares, bitterly and not unjustly, as she prepares to set out alone on the fragile trail of a man's name and a rumor of geography. "First there's great excitement. An arrest is expected in a few days! And in a few days everything's forgotten—until someone else is murdered . . . Let [Lee] handle things his own way. I'm not interfering with him." Traveling by plane, by ocean liner, and eventually by tramp steamer into ever more seedy locales, Lan Ying will carry on her father's quest—and her own—on her own terms.
Wong's appearance in Daughter of Shanghai marked her attempt to reestablish herself in Hollywood as a true Chinese-American heroine rather than the dragon-lady, lotus-blossom stereotypes that had characterized too many of her previous roles in American and British pictures. With her deep, clear, mid-Atlantic voice and her fearless poise fronting for the flicker of emotions from heartache to disgust to split-second resolve, she brings dignity and gravity to the part of determined Lan Ying; she's also got moxie to burn. Keeping her head in the griefstricken aftermath of her father's murder helped her escape his killers, but she gets herself as a job as an exotic dancer in the honky-tonk banana republic of "Port o' Juan" thanks to sheer brazen self-promotion, which of course she can back up by being Anna May Wong who knocked 'em dead in Piccadilly (1929), and for good measure will end up disguising herself as a Chinese national—and a male one at that—in order to smuggle herself aboard a Frisco-bound steamer with the latest consignment of vulnerable immigrants. Circumstances may get away from Lan Ying, but her courage and her tenacity are never in doubt. Her first scene asserted her flexible, liminal, modern identity over the Orientalizing projections of white America and she carries it through to the finish. In the meantime, if we must have a federal agent as our hero, Ahn's Kim Lee is a worthy match for Lan Ying, just as brave and resourceful and not at all inscrutable, although his ironic brows and his deadpan twist of a mouth could have made his fortune a few years later in film noir if he hadn't been working as Japanese villains in war pictures instead. As part of his cover as the supercargo of the Jenny Hawks, he claims to speak four European languages and when challenged to produce some Russian, almost without missing a beat comes out with the first five letters of the Greek alphabet. He's not indestructible—in the course of much slam-bang action, he gets knocked out twice—but he more than holds his own in the brawling climax and at a key moment of foreshadowed danger saves both his life and Lan Ying's with a feat of strength and nerve that simultaneously refutes the racist cliché of Asian men as insufficiently virile and is also just your average Bondian close shave: it is markedly unmarked. On the subject of sex, the high-shadowed, proto-noir cinematography is handled by Charles Schoenbaum and his camera is in agreement with Florey's directorial eye that if you can't appreciate Wong and Ahn, you might want to check your prejudices and/or your pulse. Their romantic pairing may have started as a necessary workaround of anti-miscegenation laws, but it pays off in eye candy and representation. Nobody ends up comically desexualized, exotically seductive, tragically dead. Perhaps just as importantly, neither do they end up indistinguishable from all those white protagonists with similar arcs of crime-fighting and romance. The last two lines of dialogue between Kim and Lan Ying are in unsubtitled, untranslated Chinese which I know to be Cantonese only because I went looking for it. The exchange follows his proposal of marriage, which makes it part of the happily-ever-after; it affirms the couple's ethnic integrity as well as their Americanness; it delights me even or especially knowing I am not its intended audience. I get Yiddish in pre-Codes to be happy about.
I said earlier that the film seems to know it is not the responsibility of the protagonists to prove themselves the "right" kind of non-white American; that does not mean it is not immensely satisfying to watch them take down a criminal ring of white Americans victimizing immigrants of all nationalities. ( What's the difference? We've got the right number. ) Even the film's exotic title, so inappropriate when Lan Ying has been firmly established as a daughter of San Francisco's Chinatown, turns out to be a pointed kind of joke: it's her stage name when she performs her incense-lit, sexy-Chinoiserie number in Port o' Juan. Her father only turned on the fortune-cookie aphorisms for the upsell.
In a just Hollywood, Wong and Ahn would have been reteamed as often as Lake and Ladd or Bogart and Bacall.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants, with whom I saw this film as part of the HFA's now-concluded series of B-movies, suggested married sleuths in the tradition of The Thin Man (1934) and I could also have gone in a big way for that. At least we have Daughter of Shanghai, demonstrating once again that even the most boilerplate of B-plots can be gold when the kinds of people traditionally pushed to the margins get to take center stage. It's a pulp blast, it's historic representation, it's not a complete trash fire about immigration and there's just no yellowface in it. Who even knew Hollywood could pull that off in 1937? What's its excuse nowadays? This discovery brought to you by my foregrounded backers at Patreon.
In fairness to its genre, I would not consider it cheating to recommend this movie on its pulp merits alone. Written by Gladys Unger and Garnett Weston and directed for Paramount by avant-garde émigré Robert Florey, it runs an economical 62 minutes and uses every trick in the B-picture book to keep its audience entertained from its bamboo-screened opening credits to its extra-American punch line—violent death and stock footage, two-fisted action and newspaper montages, sex appeal and heel face turns and rear projection and romance. There's a deadly seaplane and a pocket MacGuffin. There are contract players and an excruciatingly tense phone call negotiated by a man bound hand and foot. The protagonists fight crime in accidental parallel, going independently undercover with the same international gang only to meet again with life-threatening awkwardness in a tropical dive bar off the coast of Central America. And in 1937, in a year when the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in full force, when Warner Oland was playing Charlie Chan and Peter Lorre was playing Mr. Moto and Boris Karloff was playing Mr. Wong, the stars of this wild, intermittently topical-political ride are the Chinese-American Anna May Wong and Korean-American Philip Ahn and it makes a hell of a welcome change.
Too late for a pre-Code and too early for film noir, Daughter of Shanghai nonetheless shares for me some of their matter-of-fact subversion: it feels transgressive simply for representing something closer to the reality of the world. It's not a prestige picture carefully constructed to ease a white audience into sympathy with its marginalized protagonists by stressing their assimilation or their respectability or their model minority exceptionalism. It's a second-string programmer with all the limitations and latitude that implies; its budget stretches just about as far as dressing the sets from the director's own art collection and it drops its girl detective and its G-man into exactly the same serial-peril shenanigans that befall white protagonists in crime adventures all the time and merrily watches them go. It can't be overlooked that, as if to head off the specters of dual loyalty or perpetual foreignness, their heroism is in service of the enforcement of American immigration laws, smashing a ring of "smugglers" whose undeclared cargo is human. Despite the presence of sensationally racist headlines like "Foreign Horde Floods U.S.," however, the script's burden of villainy is clearly shown to rest not with the brutally exploited immigrants but with the traffickers who profit from their desperation and even their deaths, extorting their living contraband at every step of the journey only to cynically dispose of them if the authorities get too close, and not once is this transnational problem presented as the protagonists' especial duty to solve because of their race. Special agent Kim Lee (Ahn) was sent out from Washington not because the smuggled aliens are overwhelmingly Asian, but because he's one of the top men in his field, introduced with a front-page profile in the San Francisco Herald that subtitles his not misleadingly dapper portrait "Crack Agent for U.S. Bureau of Investigation." Wong's Lan Ying Quan, meanwhile, enters the amateur detecting racket through the time-honored motive of justice denied: her father Quan Lin (Chingwah Lee) was a prominent and beloved importer of Chinese antiques who refused a strong-arm offer of illegal, unpaid labor and for his scruples was murdered in a hijacked taxi before he could get to the Feds with what he knew. "I've seen how the authorities handle things," Lan Ying declares, bitterly and not unjustly, as she prepares to set out alone on the fragile trail of a man's name and a rumor of geography. "First there's great excitement. An arrest is expected in a few days! And in a few days everything's forgotten—until someone else is murdered . . . Let [Lee] handle things his own way. I'm not interfering with him." Traveling by plane, by ocean liner, and eventually by tramp steamer into ever more seedy locales, Lan Ying will carry on her father's quest—and her own—on her own terms.
Wong's appearance in Daughter of Shanghai marked her attempt to reestablish herself in Hollywood as a true Chinese-American heroine rather than the dragon-lady, lotus-blossom stereotypes that had characterized too many of her previous roles in American and British pictures. With her deep, clear, mid-Atlantic voice and her fearless poise fronting for the flicker of emotions from heartache to disgust to split-second resolve, she brings dignity and gravity to the part of determined Lan Ying; she's also got moxie to burn. Keeping her head in the griefstricken aftermath of her father's murder helped her escape his killers, but she gets herself as a job as an exotic dancer in the honky-tonk banana republic of "Port o' Juan" thanks to sheer brazen self-promotion, which of course she can back up by being Anna May Wong who knocked 'em dead in Piccadilly (1929), and for good measure will end up disguising herself as a Chinese national—and a male one at that—in order to smuggle herself aboard a Frisco-bound steamer with the latest consignment of vulnerable immigrants. Circumstances may get away from Lan Ying, but her courage and her tenacity are never in doubt. Her first scene asserted her flexible, liminal, modern identity over the Orientalizing projections of white America and she carries it through to the finish. In the meantime, if we must have a federal agent as our hero, Ahn's Kim Lee is a worthy match for Lan Ying, just as brave and resourceful and not at all inscrutable, although his ironic brows and his deadpan twist of a mouth could have made his fortune a few years later in film noir if he hadn't been working as Japanese villains in war pictures instead. As part of his cover as the supercargo of the Jenny Hawks, he claims to speak four European languages and when challenged to produce some Russian, almost without missing a beat comes out with the first five letters of the Greek alphabet. He's not indestructible—in the course of much slam-bang action, he gets knocked out twice—but he more than holds his own in the brawling climax and at a key moment of foreshadowed danger saves both his life and Lan Ying's with a feat of strength and nerve that simultaneously refutes the racist cliché of Asian men as insufficiently virile and is also just your average Bondian close shave: it is markedly unmarked. On the subject of sex, the high-shadowed, proto-noir cinematography is handled by Charles Schoenbaum and his camera is in agreement with Florey's directorial eye that if you can't appreciate Wong and Ahn, you might want to check your prejudices and/or your pulse. Their romantic pairing may have started as a necessary workaround of anti-miscegenation laws, but it pays off in eye candy and representation. Nobody ends up comically desexualized, exotically seductive, tragically dead. Perhaps just as importantly, neither do they end up indistinguishable from all those white protagonists with similar arcs of crime-fighting and romance. The last two lines of dialogue between Kim and Lan Ying are in unsubtitled, untranslated Chinese which I know to be Cantonese only because I went looking for it. The exchange follows his proposal of marriage, which makes it part of the happily-ever-after; it affirms the couple's ethnic integrity as well as their Americanness; it delights me even or especially knowing I am not its intended audience. I get Yiddish in pre-Codes to be happy about.
I said earlier that the film seems to know it is not the responsibility of the protagonists to prove themselves the "right" kind of non-white American; that does not mean it is not immensely satisfying to watch them take down a criminal ring of white Americans victimizing immigrants of all nationalities. ( What's the difference? We've got the right number. ) Even the film's exotic title, so inappropriate when Lan Ying has been firmly established as a daughter of San Francisco's Chinatown, turns out to be a pointed kind of joke: it's her stage name when she performs her incense-lit, sexy-Chinoiserie number in Port o' Juan. Her father only turned on the fortune-cookie aphorisms for the upsell.
In a just Hollywood, Wong and Ahn would have been reteamed as often as Lake and Ladd or Bogart and Bacall.
skygiants, with whom I saw this film as part of the HFA's now-concluded series of B-movies, suggested married sleuths in the tradition of The Thin Man (1934) and I could also have gone in a big way for that. At least we have Daughter of Shanghai, demonstrating once again that even the most boilerplate of B-plots can be gold when the kinds of people traditionally pushed to the margins get to take center stage. It's a pulp blast, it's historic representation, it's not a complete trash fire about immigration and there's just no yellowface in it. Who even knew Hollywood could pull that off in 1937? What's its excuse nowadays? This discovery brought to you by my foregrounded backers at Patreon.
