25TO BE KISSED, OR NOT

CURIOUSLY, the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s turned out to be good fortune for American filmmakers. Long rebuked and vilified as hell-bent subverters of middle-class values, Hollywood Babylonians saw the heavenly gates swing open under the sheer forces of social and economic devastation. A depression-wracked nation yearned for distraction and entertainment, and filmmakers were ready to provide a cinematic salve. Having successfully transitioned to sound, the industry was maturing, with new genres forming, new stars being born, and studios achieving extraordinary power. The movies would continue to rise in popularity and influence until 1946, when theater attendance reached its all-time peak before the arrival of television.¹

Laws of nature, however, dictate that, to reach the top, one has to hit bottom first. Even la-la land was not depression-proof. Trouble in paradise began when nearly a third of theaters nationwide were shuttered and admission prices fell by a third in 1933. Half of the eight major studios were in financial disarray that year: Paramount, the famous house that Adolph Zukor built (and Anna May’s lifeboat), sank into bankruptcy; RKO and Universal were in receivership; Fox underwent a major overhaul and would be taken over by a much smaller company, Twentieth Century. It was no surprise, then, that Paramount, already a broken ship at the time of Shanghai Express’s release, was unable to offer the biggest Chinese star a new contract.

Without stable employment, Anna May became footloose again. Between 1932 and 1935, she crossed the Atlantic Ocean many times, acted in half a dozen films, and appeared in revues all over Europe and North America.

When she was still finishing up Shanghai Express, Anna May signed a contract with World Wide Pictures, a small Hollywood studio, to play the female lead in a Sherlock Holmes adaptation. World Wide Pictures, the American distributor of her breakaway British film Piccadilly, also would soon fall victim to the hard times hitting the industry, and A Study in Scarlet, made in 1933, was its final production. Inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s eponymous novella about the supremely deductive and eccentric resident at London’s 221B Baker Street, the film has virtually nothing to do with the original plot except for a sentence spoken by the supersleuth: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and expose every inch of it.”² Adopting that line as the epigraph, the film shows a series of murders involving a secret society, the Scarlet Ring, which holds meetings in a deserted building in Limehouse. Reginald Owen played Sherlock Holmes, a role coveted by many aspiring actors due to the immense popularity of the character. In fact, Clive Brook, the male lead in Shanghai Express, had impersonated the detective in the first Sherlock Holmes “talkie” in 1929, and he was reprising the role in a new adaptation produced by Paramount in late 1932, apparently in competition with A Study in Scarlet. It seems that global audiences could not get enough of the hijinks of the cocaine-addicted, violin-playing detective.

Cast in a smaller production by an impoverished studio, Anna May cameoed as Mrs. Pyke, an elegantly dressed widow who puts on a façade of respectability and sophistication but is actually in cahoots with the mastermind of the murderous ring. When playing second fiddle in Shanghai Express, Anna May was costumed more plainly in order to supply a contrast for the domineering Dietrich. Now cast as the female lead, each of her appearances was choreographed like a walk down the runway at a Milan fashion show, even though her entire screen time is no more than eight minutes. Speaking with an upper-class British accent, Anna May’s character constantly switches wardrobes that range from a double-breasted tweed coat accompanied by a soft slouching hat to an evening pantsuit evoking a Shanghai motif, to a satin gown with wide sleeves that she wears while holding a cigarette à la Bogart. As Anthony Chan aptly puts it in Perpetually Cool, it seemed that A Study in Scarlet “was merely a showcase for Anna May Wong’s modeling talents.”³

This focus on Anna May’s wardrobe signaled an interesting turn in her career and would contribute to her enduring legacy as a fashion icon. Ever since her first starring role in The Toll of the Sea, the camera had always loved the Chinese actress who could wear any costume like her second skin, and Piccadilly extended the romance. After a decade of acting and a long sojourn in European metropoles, Anna May had developed a keen sense of fashion, intuiting astutely that the essence of celebrity is as much skein as skin. As she once said to a German reporter, “You can forgive a woman for a face that is not beautiful more easily than for a dress that isn’t.”⁴ When good parts were hard to get, she found other ways to make herself visible and continued to project her star power via fashion, both on and off the screen.

Anna May Wong in her coolie hat, displaying golden, gem-studded nail guards, 1934 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

In late 1931, after Anna May returned from Europe, she delivered the equivalent of a present-day TED Talk on makeup before an adoring audience of three hundred women in San Francisco. Sponsored by the San Francisco Chronicle, the program announced that the film star would lecture on “her theory of what actually constituted Oriental beauty,” “the fine points of Celestial comeliness,” and “the feminine preparations for the stage and the street.”⁵ In her talk, Anna May spoke of her own starstruck childhood and her first encounter with makeup, which involved Chinese red paper, white rice powder, and “a board of burned matches.” She then gave advice on daily work and street cosmetics, and her counsel simply boiled down to three rules: “Use powder the exact shade of the skin, blend color with powder with the utmost care, and use makeup so that it will be as inconspicuous as possible.”⁶ Turning herself into a fashion icon with expertise on makeup eventually paid off. In 1934, the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York named Wong “The World’s Best Dressed Woman.” It was an honor that surely brought her much consolation, if not income, when major studios continued to snub her.

In 1934, after A Study in Scarlet, Anna May went to England and starred in three films. The first, Tiger Bay, is a noirish tale with a touch of the Western. Originally set in London’s notorious Limehouse, it was relocated to an unspecified South American port due to British censorship. In the native quarters of Tiger Bay, a slum full of the riffraff of the seven seas, Lui Chang (Wong) runs a popular nightclub with tastefully exotic Chinese decor. A local gang, led by Olaf, targets the club for its protection racket. When rejected, Olaf and his men begin to make trouble for the seemingly delicate Chinese hostess. What the gangsters do not know is that Lui Chang is actually the daughter of a Manchu nobleman, and that she had to flee China after a bloody war had killed everyone in her family. A gutsy survivor, she is not intimidated by a few local ruffians. With the cunning of a dragon’s daughter and the courage of Gary Cooper’s Marshal Kane in High Noon, she faces off with the gang, killing Olaf and then jabbing her wrist with a poisoned ring. Dying, she whispers an ancient Chinese poem.

The film gave Anna May ample space and time to show off her wardrobe, dance skills, and exotic charm. Her first appearance is shot in the style of Dietrich’s Shanghai Lily: full frame of her upper body, her face glowing against the glitter and sheen of her jewelry and costume. Some of her lines were well written, reminiscent of her badinage in Shanghai Express, such as “I have my business to think of. Police and business don’t go together in Tiger Bay.” But overall, it was a run-of-the-mill B-movie with stilted dialogues and droll scenes. One segment in which Chang recalls the battle in the Chinese capital is particularly egregious: It shows an immaculately dressed Chinese man sitting in a flying rickshaw and aimlessly shooting a gun as if setting off fireworks. It seems as if he had forgotten how to act or simply given up trying. Or, more likely, the director of an uninspiring film did not care enough about such details.

Anna May’s next film, Chu Chin Chow (1934), was a far more ambitious production. Ever since its introduction to Europe in the seventeenth century, The Arabian Nights had been popular in stirring the Western imagination about the Arab world. Characters such as Scheherazade, Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba were household names as familiar as Snow White and Cinderella. In the twentieth century, after Oscar Asche adapted the tale of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” into the comic operetta Chu Chin Chow, the Arabian tale with a Chinese meringue was staged at His Majesty’s Theatre and ran for 2,238 consecutive performances—from August 31, 1916, to July 22, 1921. A welcome distraction in the dark days of the Great War, the musical was also produced in New York, playing at the Metropolitan Opera House for 105 performances between 1917 and 1918.

Counting on its sustaining appeal, British producers decided to bring Chu Chin Chow onto the screen with a sizable budget of half a million dollars. Directed by Walter Forde, the cinematic adaptation had a star-studded cast, including the top-billing George Robey, a legendary musical hall comic, also known as the “Prime Minister of Mirth”; Fritz Kortner, one of Austria’s foremost stage performers; John Garrick, a noted British actor/singer; and Pearl Argyle, Britain’s leading ballerina. In addition, Erno Metzner designed lavish sets for the musical extravaganza, and Mutz Greenbaum worked the camera. Kortner, Metzner, and Greenbaum were all top artists from the German Expressionist era who, as Jews, had escaped the tightening net that constricted the lives of German Jews in the years before Kristallnacht in 1938 transformed the country into a killing field.

Joining the impressive cast, though billed third, was Anna May, who was featured most prominently on publicity posters. In one still, the publicists went so far as to make her wear an Egyptian cap, channeling the ancient Queen Nefertiti, even though Anna May was playing Zahrat, a slave girl. Serving in the house of Ali Baba’s wealthy brother Kasim Baba, Zahrat is actually a spy, sort of an aide-de-camp, for the robber chief Abu Hassan. It was a role similar to the Mongol mole Anna May had played in The Thief of Bagdad. There was, in fact, much similarity between these two films. Both were spectacular Orientalist fantasies that feature flashy—if not fleshy—costumes, kitschy sets, and Caucasians dressed up as Arabs, Chinese, or Blacks. While Douglas Fairbanks capered around like an adult Aladdin in The Thief of Bagdad, the Austrian-born Kortner played Chu Chin Chow’s Abu Hassan alternately in brownface, yellowface, and blackface. The difference here for Anna May, however, is that her conniving character this time gets a chance for redemption. Zahrat is initially responsible for sending intelligence via carrier pigeon to the robber chief and setting in motion all the havoc Hassan and his band will wreak. Later she repents and inhabits the role of the clever Morgiana in the original story from The Arabian Nights by identifying the forty thieves hiding inside oil jars and spoiling Hassan’s plot. In the end, it is Zahrat who spots Hassan in disguise and kills him with a knife. Once again, like Hui Fei in Shanghai Express and Lui Chang in Tiger Bay, Anna May’s character rises to the occasion and takes the matter into her own hands.

Released in Britain in July 1934, and two months later in the United States, the film received glowing reviews. The New York Times called it “a tasteful, spectacular and robust adaptation.” The Film Daily singled out Anna May for being “very alluring as Zahrat.” Motion Picture Exhibitor commented on the film’s international appeal, adding: “There are a few names familiar to American audiences, but the vastness of the picture and its scope are dominant.” London’s Times observed that Chu Chin Chow is “easily the biggest thing in its class that has ever come from England [and] marks a definite challenge by Great Britain to American producers.”⁷ Not minding the transatlantic challenge, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took his mother to a private screening in New York to celebrate her eightieth birthday that September. Less than two years into his tenure, the thirty-second president could only wish that digging the nation out of the Great Depression was as easy as saying “Open sesame.”⁸

In contrast to the great fanfare generated by Chu Chin Chow, Anna May’s third film made in England that year was, to quote her most sympathetic biographer, “a dud.”⁹ Produced by Basil Dean—the theatrical director who had given Anna May her first part on the British stage—Java Head is a diluted version of Madame Butterfly that takes place not in the Far East but in a bucolic English seaport. Gerrit Ammidon (John Loder), a British trader in China, marries a Manchu princess named Taou Yen (Wong) and brings her home to England. Like a freak show, the arrival of a “heathen Chinese” with long fingernails and outlandish manners causes a stir in the English hamlet. In addition to wearing exotic Manchu costumes, Taou Yen kneels down on all fours when greeting an elder; she never shakes hands but prefers to kowtow; she prays at a Buddhist altar rather than to the Christian God. Feeling the heat of public and familial outrage, Gerrit begins to question his own choice while rekindling his flame for Nettie (Elizabeth Allan), an English girl. Noticing her husband’s affection for the other woman, the Manchu princess metamorphoses into an archetypal Cho Cho San or Lotus Flower by sacrificing herself so that the two white lovers can live happily ever after.

By and large a flop, Java Head is nonetheless noteworthy for being the first and only film in which Anna May’s character is kissed by a Caucasian man. Under the pretext of a married couple, Gerrit is seen kissing Taou Yen in one scene. Taking place demurely in their bedroom, it is less a kiss than a light peck on the chin, with the camera angle purposefully blocking the view of the lips. It is in no way comparable to another scene where Gerrit and Nettie are engaged in a passionate kiss to consummate their declaration of love.

The “kissing taboo” might have been broken, but the curse remained. Anna May Wong, the fashion icon who had won the honorary title of “The World’s Best Dressed Woman,” was still a beauty no one was allowed to kiss.