Spotlight: Anna May Wong
Wong Liu Tsong was born in Los Angeles in 1905 and was on screen by fourteen. Hollywood gave her extras and dragon ladies. The AFI Catalog treats The Toll of the Sea, her first lead at seventeen, as the first feature shot in the two-strip Technicolor process. Piccadilly, made in London, is the performance the American parts were pointing at. Watch how much she does with a look the script did not write. Studio practice and anti-miscegenation rules kept her off most romantic leads at home. She went to Germany, learned the languages, and came back to Fu Manchu's daughter. Shanghai Express is the Hollywood ceiling: second billed, sacrificial, photographed like a star.
13 films
From the Reading Room
The Red Lantern
1919 · Albert Capellani
Fourteen, uncredited, carrying a lantern in a night parade, and paid a dollar-fifty more than the other extras. Nazimova does the Boxer Rebellion in yellowface. Wong is a face in a crowd for a few seconds. Look for her anyway. That is the whole practice this collection teaches.
Outside the Law
1921 · Tod Browning
Sixteen, a gang accomplice, a few scenes in a Chinatown built on a Universal lot. Chaney is doing two parts; Wong is doing one, small, in the same frame as him. Watch where her eyes go when she is not the subject of the shot.
The Toll of the Sea
1923 · Chester M. Franklin
Her first lead, at seventeen, in the first feature shot entirely in two-color Technicolor. Madame Butterfly moved to China, with the ending intact. The process is the selling point. She is the reason to watch. Hollywood would not give her the frame again for years.
Drifting
1923 · Tod Browning
Browning again, Priscilla Dean running opium, and Wong as the doctor's daughter with more screen time than the billing implies. Watch the camera drift toward her when Dean is out of frame. Browning noticed. The billing did not.
The Thief of Bagdad
1924 · Raoul Walsh
The Mongol slave, the palace spy, the beautiful villain who has to be punished. Wong at nineteen in the most expensive set in Hollywood, and every entrance is hers. The template gets set here: too good to leave out, too foreign to let win.
Peter Pan
1924 · Herbert Brenon
Tiger Lily, written in the period's idea of an Indian princess, in a Christmas picture with the wires showing. Wong does it with a stillness the pantomime around her cannot match. Famous enough for a named part. Only the parts with a costume attached.
Old San Francisco
1927 · Alan Crosland
A few shots as a Flower of the Orient, a Vitaphone score, an earthquake for the third act. Warner Oland runs Chinatown in yellowface. Wong is billed below the disaster. She left for Europe within the year, and this is a fair sample of why.
Song
1928 · Richard Eichberg
Berlin, a part written for her, and a camera that stays. A knife-thrower's act, a blind man, a woman who does not leave. Walter Benjamin watched her cry on the lot. Berlin's critics called her Chinese, not American, which tells you what she had escaped and what she had not.
Pavement Butterfly
1929 · Richard Eichberg
Paris, a stunt-show death, a Russian painter, and the Riviera. The German and British cuts disagree about the ending, and the German one lets her say she does not belong with them. Watch the dances. She knew exactly what the camera did to a body and used it.
Piccadilly
1929 · E.A. Dupont
The one the American parts were pointing at. Shosho comes up from the scullery and takes the club, and takes the film from Gilda Gray with it. Variety said so. The kiss with a white extra was cut before release. Watch the dance, then watch the owner watching it. Both are the film.
Daughter of the Dragon
1931 · Lloyd Corrigan
She came home to this: Fu Manchu's daughter, Warner Oland in yellowface for the last time, a white couple parked in the background to be endangered. She and Hayakawa play it with a precision that reads as contempt. Her voice, low and exact, is the one thing here Paramount did not deserve.
Shanghai Express
1932 · Josef von Sternberg
The Hollywood ceiling. Hui Fei shares the compartment, does the thing the plot needs in the last reels, and is photographed by Garmes like the star she is not billed as. Dietrich is the poster. Watch the two women together: the film's only honest relationship.
A Study in Scarlet
1933 · Edwin L. Marin
Poverty Row, a rented title, a Holmes who talks. Wong is Mrs. Pyke, the woman the poster can use. It is here as the end of the American line: the parts stayed this size for the rest of her career, and she kept doing them better than they deserved.