21THE FIRST WORD

From Moscow down to Astrakhan

You’ll hear love tales from every man

Some girls can’t kiss, but some girls can

—Theme song of the film Hai-Tang (1930)

IT IS SOMEWHAT IRONIC that the first word Anna May uttered in a talkie was “Mitleid,” German for “pity.” It was a plea to authority for leniency.

Prodded by the harsh reviews of her voice in The Circle of Chalk, Anna May took singing lessons and hired an elocution teacher from Oxford University to study voice.¹ Paying two hundred guineas per session to eliminate her California accent may seem exorbitant, but with the arrival of sound in the film industry, she was facing an existential threat, the same one experienced by many other silent-film stars. The momentous success of The Jazz Singer, the first talkie using the Vitaphone sound system, signaled that the days of the silent film were numbered. Overnight, the small Warner Bros. company leaped to the front ranks of the industry, forcing other studios to catch up. Big investments were made to build recording studios to accommodate talkies. In fact, sound gave the Europeans a tremendous psychological lift in their battle against American domination. The British in particular, always assuming the superiority of the British accent—which Henry James extolled as the “tone standard”—were convinced that their time had arrived.²

The impact of the talkie revolution on actors and the cinema was incalculable. As Charlie Chaplin said, “Just when we got it right, it was over.”³ The maestro of pantomime, who would resist the talkies and continue to make silent films until The Great Dictator in 1940, was no exception. In Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Josef von Sternberg recalled, “With the arrival of sound in films, Mr. Chaplin lost his cunning. The voice that issued from the mouth of the clown he had invented bore no relation to the mask.”⁴ At the dawn of talkies, as famously dramatized in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), many silent stars with squeaky voices quickly fell out of favor, while others remained apprehensive about the new technology. “The problem of speech was a real one,” Robert Sklar writes. “Elocution coaches made a killing; actors with clipped British accents hastened to Hollywood; observers predicted that the foreign players who had become so significant in Hollywood silents would be packed off back to Sweden, Germany or Czechoslovakia.”⁵ Even the great Emil Jannings was worried about his own voice and feared for the loss of his expressive power.⁶ Greta Garbo, then a Swedish ingenue, suffered a setback. Having played sophisticated socialites in all of her American silent films, Garbo made her talkie debut in MGM’s Anna Christie (1930). Speaking to a waiter in a waterfront dive, her long-awaited first movie words were, to be kind, flavorful: “Gimme a visky. Ginger ale on the side. And don’ be stingy, ba-bee.” The screaming tagline of “Garbo talks!” put out by MGM’s marketers as enticement, ironically captured the shock of the audience.⁷

Mindful of the transition, Anna May astutely took steps to ready herself. In addition to the voice lessons, she also started learning French while boning up on German. With the technique of dubbing still a few years away, her first talkie would be made separately in three different language versions: German, English, and French. She was working again with Richard Eichberg, who had arranged with British International Pictures (BIP) and the French company Etablissements Jacques Haik to shoot big-budget, multilingual sound features at Elstree Studios. This new film—titled Hai-Tang in German, The Road to Honor in English (The Flame of Love in the United States), and L’Amour Maître des Choses in French—borrowed the heroine’s name from The Circle of Chalk, even though its plotline had nothing to do with the stage drama. Playing the title character, Anna May was a dancer touring with a troupe in Tsarist Russia. Suffering from unrequited love for a dashing Russian officer, she has to sleep with a villainous archduke in order to save her brother from execution. Feeling ashamed, she, yet again, commits suicide in the end.

In Hai-Tang, Anna May spoke her first word in a sound feature. She recalled the vexing moment in an article she wrote for Mein Film in 1930: “As the word escaped my lips and was swallowed up by the lurking ear of the microphone, I was gripped by a horrible fear that it had not sounded right.” It was another one of those mise-en-abyme scenes where the story in the film corresponded to the happening outside the film. On-screen, Hai-Tang utters the word Mitleid (pity), begging the archduke, who has just violated her sexually, for leniency: “Pity! Pity! Your Imperial Highness—Oh, have pity on my brother.…” Off-screen, the actress was asking for sympathy from those making the film and those listening to her voice recorded in the studio. “It was the most exciting moment of my entire film career,” she said. “Of course, even during the close-ups in silent film shoots, I trembled with worry and wondered if the shoots came out flattering. But the film camera usually faithfully transmits play and expression. What one entrusts to it in terms of performing output and emotional input is almost always found unchanged in the projection.” Such a certainty was lost with sound. As she explained further, “No matter how hard you work on it and struggle for perfect pronunciation and the right tone vibration, you never know how it will sound in the end when the film is being shown. This uncertainty makes the heart pound and the voice tremble.” Fortunately, after the first syllables, with every word that followed, the fear dissipated. “My voice gradually regained its firmness, and I felt proud and happy like a student of swimming who is left off the leash for the first time and I feel he is asserting himself against the element with his own strength.”⁸

Besides the anxiety over sound, she was also forced to carry an extra load of work. To make these multilingual films, completely different casts were usually employed for each language version. In the case of Hai-Tang, however, the filmmaker, taking advantage of her remarkable linguistic agility and impeccable work ethic, cast Anna May as the lead in all three versions, opposite different partners in each: In the German version, she paired up with Franz Lederer; in English, with John Longden; and in French, with Robert Ancelin. They were essentially working her like a coolie in a Chinese laundry. When all the filming was done, she was so exhausted that she had to check herself into a sanitorium to rest. Even that was interrupted by the urgent demand for her to make an appearance at the film’s premiere.⁹

The three versions of Hai-Tang, released within months of each other, received mixed reviews. German critics lauded Anna May’s fluency in German—some thought she must have used a double—but were not impressed by her first venture into sound. One reviewer wrote, “Anna May Wong’s incredibly subtle and expressive art, enhanced by her exotic appeal, was one of the greatest treasures of the silent film. With deepest regret one cannot help noticing that a lot of this appeal has been lost with the introduction of dialogue.” Ernst Jaeger, who had written glowing reviews of her earlier German films, reached a similar conclusion: “Anna May Wong was a silent miracle. Her intellectual diction merely adds curious novelty.” Jaeger went on to criticize the production, which was heavily influenced by British prudery: “It is interesting to see how well the producer Eichberg has understood the English mentality: eroticism without sex-appeal, exoticism without miscegenation.”¹⁰

The Anglo-American press was equally lukewarm. The Bioscope dissed the film but recognized, with a caveat, the star power of the female lead: “This story can hardly be said to rouse emotions, as all the characters belong to the stage rather than to real life. Anna May Wong gives a very effective performance, in which her grace and skill as a dancer are supplemented by her skill as a vocalist. Her speaking voice has hardly the same appeal.” Likewise, the reviewer for the New York Times had mixed feelings about the English film: “The stilted dialogue of this version makes the entire production seem unreal and obscures the haunting Oriental beauty of the star, Anna May Wong. Miss Wong is one of the few cinema luminaries able to convey poignant emotion with restraint.” And Variety noted that “Miss Wong talks flat American.”¹¹

The French press was more receptive, partly due to the fact that the premiere of L’Amour Maître des Choses coincided with the opening of the first luxurious cinema on the Champs-Elysées. Reviewers were impressed with Anna May’s “impeccable diction” in a language she hardly knew—a feat that would be accomplished again one day by the Japanese actor Eiji Okada in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). Cinémonde praised the “amazing performance from this beautiful and voluptuous woman, this strangely sincere and fascinating interpreter.” Even the New York Times spilled ink on the French version of the film, calling it “a production with some interesting interludes” but faulting its vocal recording: “Here and there one hears poorly synchronized songs from Miss Wong and M. Ancelin.”¹²

Though a financial flop, the tri-lingual films gave Anna May extensive global coverage. More important, they helped to alleviate her apprehension over the technology of sound. While many actors could not survive the transition, she was able to pull it off in no fewer than three different languages.

Change, however, did not happen just in the film industry. As Anna May flourished in Europe, the world seemed to stand on the verge of a cataclysm. The 1929 stock market crash on Wall Street sent the world economy into a tailspin, causing human misery and social unrest that would unleash some of the darkest forces in modern history. In September 1930, the Nazis became the second largest political party in Germany, overtaking the Communists. The Weimar Republic was on life support. Marlene Dietrich would leave for America, while Leni Riefenstahl would emerge as Hitler’s propaganda filmmaker. Given the rise of nativism and fascism, Europe was fast turning into an unfriendly place for the Chinese American star.

Perhaps symbolically, Anna May’s last cinematic act during her European sojourn was a rowdy revue. Directed by Adrian Brunel and shot in London, Elstree Calling (1930) was a spoof of The Taming of the Shrew, put out by the Fairbanks–Pickford team. Clad in a risqué two-piece silver outfit and rattling off cries in Cantonese, Anna May threw car tires, furniture pieces, and shoes down a staircase, also hurling custard pies at her Petruchio. Even when the Bard himself showed up, he received a pie in the face. It was the kind of Shakespearean burlesque that could bring some bittersweet laughter to anxious moviegoers. Adding to the symbolism, the assistant director of the on-screen variety show was none other than Alfred Hitchcock, the future explorer of the human psyche’s darkest crevices. According to Graham Hodges, one scene cut from the film showed Hitchcock “plastering Anna May with a pie.”¹³

Feeling homesick in London after two and a half years abroad, Anna May did not wait to hear what critics had to say about Elstree Calling. In a strange dream one night, she and a female friend stood beneath a willow tree, weeping silently. The image reminded her of a scene in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a novel she cherished. During the time Jane runs away from Mr. Rochester and is about to make a life-changing decision, she feels a premonition, as if hearing Rochester calling her name in the air, an almost-supernatural occurrence. Jane hurries back to Thornfield, only to find that the estate has burned to the ground and her beloved has been maimed and blinded in the inferno. Since “Willow” was Anna May’s Chinese name, she interpreted the dream as a bad omen.¹⁴ Perhaps clairvoyant like Brontë’s heroine, or like the soothsayer she would play a few years later in When Were You Born?, Anna May quickly opted to sail back home to America.