18THE VAMP

SOON AFTER her meeting with Walter Benjamin in Berlin, Anna May went to France in June 1928 to make her second film with Richard Eichberg. It was a trip that took her from the Parisian streets and the Louvre to the roulette tables of Monte Carlo on the French Riviera—all locations for this new movie. When Benjamin associated Anna May with America’s fabled frontiers by calling her “a Chinoiserie from the Old West,” he might have had a point. This cultural amalgamation of femme fatale and violence became a proven formula for success as a film subject. The cinematic allure of gun molls is as enduring as happy endings of riding into the sunset. Even before her crowning as the vampirish “Daughter of the Dragon,” Anna May’s characters had always brushed against danger. In Song, her title character dies in a precarious sword dance. Now in Großstadtschmetterling (aka Pavement Butterfly), her new incarnation would again be ensnared in a plot of death by blade.

Set alternately in Paris and Nice, the film featured Anna May as a Chinese variety dancer. Performing under the stage name of Princess Butterfly, Mah does fan dances at a street fair to accompany a Chinese circus artist, who pulls a stunt of “The Flying Harikari”—jumping through a wooden frame lined with sharp knives. Koko, a spurned and vindictive suitor of Mah, murders her partner and blames it on her. Running through the Parisian streets, Mah takes refuge in the studio of a young artist named Kusmin. She models for him and in the process falls in love with him. Kusmin’s portrait of Mah is sold to a rich patron, but on her way to the bank, she encounters Koko, who robs her of the money. Mistakenly accusing her of theft, Kusmin throws her out. Back on the street again, she is rescued this time by the baron who has bought her portrait. He takes her down to Monte Carlo, where she manages to retrieve the money stolen by Koko—only to see that Kusmin has a new love interest. Walking through the layered shadows of a portico fronting a casino, she exits from the life of the man she loves.

Befitting the film’s working title Die Fremde (The Foreigner), Pavement Butterfly portrays the story of a “racial other” living on the margins of a Western society. A beautiful and highly desirable woman, she is nonetheless an outsider who does not fit in. Easily misunderstood, she is lovable but untouchable. Writing again for the Film-Kurier, Ernst Jaeger noted the poor treatment of the “Chinese girl in saccharine”: “The Eichberg team did not dare to let a happy white man share the same bed as the undressed body of a Mongolian woman.” He ascribed the film’s “erotic hypocrisy” to the British influence (the film was coproduced by British International Pictures), calling it “the Anglo-American icing on the cinematic cake.”¹ Another reviewer for a Socialist newspaper was more direct in criticizing the film’s sexism and racism, attributing it also to foreign influences: “Following the American scheme, the Chinese woman has to rescue a young white man, a painter, and at the end—because the white race is so sky-high superior to the yellow one—she gets the usual boot.”²

Despite their harsh critiques of the film, the reviewers praised Anna May as the lead actress, noting her “personality and exotic charm,” while recognizing the film as an interesting “vehicle for the varied talent of the charming star.”³ More important, Pavement Butterfly, as suggested by the title phrase, introduced a new character type, a role that indeed uniquely belonged to Anna May. While the word butterfly implies the familiar Madame Butterfly, and the sorrowful ending confirms the film’s place in the Orientalist pedagogy, pavement points not only to a new setting for this old character type but also to the advent of a new figure. In his biography of Anna May, Graham Hodges maintains that, “had Walter Benjamin been less overwhelmed by Anna May Wong’s beauty, he might have enlarged his creative interpretation of Baudelaire’s concept of the flaneur, or urban observer.”⁴ Indeed, Parisian streets, where Anna May’s character roams, poignantly evoke the Baudelairean figure of an incognito stroller. As an ethnic outsider, Princess Butterfly may share some characteristics with Charles Baudelaire’s Parisian prowler, an alienated yet compassionate male aesthete who “muses on the bizarre in the commonplace, the sublime in the mundane,” a witness to a teeming metropolis on the eve of great change.⁵ But, as a woman, she is perhaps thematically much closer to another type of character emerging in Weimar Germany as well as European cinema at the time: the vamp.

Even though during those interwar years the proportion of women in employment in Weimar Germany remained constant—rising only slightly from 31.2 percent in 1907 to 35.6 percent in 1925—the expansion of the areas in which women were now working, particularly in modern sectors of industry, commerce, and public employment, represented a shift in women’s public presence. With increased access to higher education and better jobs, women also became more involved in politics. In the Weimar Republic, for example, 111 women were elected to the Reichstag. A feminist manifesto, “This Is the New Woman,” published in 1929, declared:

The new woman has set herself the goal of proving in her work and deeds that the representatives of the female sex are not second-class persons existing only in dependence and obedience but are fully capable of satisfying the demands of their positions in life. The proof of her personal value and the proof of the value of her sex are therefore the maxims ruling the life of every single woman in our times.⁶

Reflecting these social trends, a new figure appeared on the silver screen as a male-generated fantasy of a modern woman: the glamorous girl who is “a bit too independent to be true, armed with bobbed hair and made-up face, fashionable clothes and cigarette, working by day in a typing pool or behind the sales counter in some dreamland of consumerism, frittering away the night dancing the Charleston or watching UFA and Hollywood films.” As Detlev Peukert states in his study of the Weimar Republic, such a caricature bore little resemblance to the young female white-collar workers whose lives had inspired it. But this did not prevent the mythology of the “new woman” from being promoted by the media and taking on a life of its own. Peukert writes: “The worlds conjured up by the illustrated magazines, serials and hospital romances, by romantic films and musical comedies and by advertising and the new consumerism made their mark on the attitudes and daydreams of many young women.”⁷ The 1930 film The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich, did much to further popularize the image of the vamp. Playing a seductress named Lola, Dietrich trotted out her legs on stage and crooned in her husky voice,

love is just a game

to me men are drawn

like moths to the flame.

Anna May’s character in Pavement Butterfly was no temptress like Dietrich’s Lola, but Mah is equally attractive to the men around her, with some even willing, in a noir way, to kill for her. Like Lola, Mah orbits among the demimonde of artists and gamblers, bedecked in the latest Parisian fashions, loving passionately, and yet having the courage to walk away when she realizes the futility of the affection. Her parting words, in particular, reveal her streak of independence as a new woman: “Ich gehöre nicht zu euch” (I don’t belong to you). Anticipating her signature “Dragon Lady” role in the talkie era, Anna May added a dimension of the “exotic other” to the image of the vamp. In other words, she is simultaneously Madame Butterfly and the vamp.

Speaking of female iconography, Anna May attended the 1928 Berlin Press Ball where she met two figures who defined new womanhood in Germany: Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl. In a photograph taken for the occasion by Alfred Eisenstaedt, these three icons of twentieth-century cinema huddle together: A young, pre-Hollywood Dietrich flirtatiously grits a cigarette holder between her teeth; Anna May stands tallest in the middle, smiling into the camera, straight bangs outlining her face, a long string of pearls dangling in front of her sheath dress; and Riefenstahl, the most reserved and matronly of the three, has her arm around Anna May’s waist, as if jealously protecting the young woman from her assertive competitor.⁸

When this photo was taken, Dietrich had not yet made her first breakaway film, The Blue Angel, but she had been a successful stage actor, demonstrating her talents in musicals, revues, and a few silent features. Riefenstahl was her friend and rival. As Karin Wieland shows in her remarkable duo-biography, both Dietrich and Riefenstahl came of age at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, and both sought fame in Germany’s nascent film industry. While Dietrich’s depiction of Lola in The Blue Angel would soon catapult her to global stardom, Riefenstahl, who missed out on the part, would insinuate herself into Hitler’s inner circle and become the Führer’s camerawoman. The dissonance of these two women, born less than a year apart and following diametrically opposite paths of life and career, encapsulates the undulations of twentieth-century history.⁹ But we should not forget the third woman in this photo, Anna May, who stood in the center but was continuously pushed to the margins by forces beyond her control.

Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl at Berlin Press Ball, 1928 (Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums / Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Lufthansa German Airlines)

On this evening at the press ball—an occasion representing the pinnacle of Berlin nightlife in the Golden Twenties—friendship, love, and jealousy were all in the air. Other snapshots taken by Eisenstaedt, already a rising star as a cameraman, show Anna May pouring liquor into Dietrich’s mouth, with Riefenstahl standing by, looking naughty.¹⁰ By all accounts, Anna May was a bigger star than the pre-Lola Dietrich and the pre-Hitler Riefenstahl on this bacchic night. A Hollywooder hired to energize Germany’s Babelsberg, she was literally the toast of the town. For an Asian actress like her, however, stardom did not mean acceptance, and fascination could not be mistaken for equity—a cultural lesson she would learn at the next stop of her globe-trotting journey.