Live from London
searching for Anna May Wong in British archives
This month’s dispatch is coming to you a week and a day late with what I think is a pretty good excuse. For the last week and half I’ve been in London watching some of Anna May Wong’s rare and hard to find European films at the British Film Institute (BFI) and going through old movie magazines at the British Library.
On my first day in London, I was led down into the bowels of BFI: a series of basement screening rooms, most only big enough to accommodate one person comfortably, with heavy, sound-proof doors that seal shut using a giant metal latch. They would probably make good bomb shelters. What could have been a dismal environ was fortunately made exactly the opposite by Stephen Tollervey, the cheerful chief film technician who manages archival visits at BFI. He delivered stacks of 35 mm reels to my little screening room, sometimes along with a cup of tea and a plate of digestives, showed me how to spool the film so that I could watch it on the hulking Steenbeck editing machine, and affably inquired about what I thought of the films at the end of each day.
The films I liked best were those that felt imbued with AMW’s heart and soul. In my two favorites, Song (1928) and Pavement Butterfly (1929), AMW’s capacity as an actress and artist is on full display. As you might expect, though, not all of the films held up so well.
The limitations of Anna May’s race as dictated by the dominant culture (in this case, primarily English) bleed through the frames in pictures like The Flame of Love (1929), in which British censors forbade AMW from kissing her co-star John Longden on screen; Chu Chin Chow (1934), a retelling of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” where AMW plays the duplicitous slave Zahrat; Tiger Bay (1934), an enjoyable film that nonetheless blocks AMW from being the love interest and instead has her play the surrogate mother of an orphaned white girl—she is ultimately the one who gets to fall in love and marry; and Java Head (1934), a kind of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner set in 19th-century England with AMW and John Loder replacing Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton, except the shunned Chinese wife dies in the end (but at least she got to kiss her husband?).
In fact, AMW’s characters die in four out of the six films, most commonly suicide by poison. Every Chinese woman, it seems, conveniently wears a ring that doubles as a poisonous pill box.
Whether they were revelations or disappointments, the fun part of getting to watch these films was experiencing them for the first time like a regular moviegoer. I’ve often had to rely on vague, lackluster movie synopses instead of watching AMW’s films myself since many of her early films are no longer extant, and two years into the pandemic, certain archives (ahem, UCLA and Margaret Herrick Library) remain closed to the public. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Knowing something because you’ve read it in a book is not the same thing as knowing something because you’ve seen it with your own eyes. So I packed my bags for England, one of the few places where her European films have been preserved.
I started my mini film festival with Song, also called Dirty Money in German or Show Life in the British release. This was the film that Anna May Wong left Hollywood to make in Berlin in 1928, that earned her a cult following in Europe, and made her a star in the eyes of then-wannabes Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl.
The screenplay was written by Karl Vollmöller specifically for AMW, which is why it was retitled Song, a nod to her Chinese name Wong Liu Tsong. The story, which sounds absurd on paper, follows a Malaysian street urchin in an unnamed Middle Eastern city that looks very much like Istanbul. Jack, a man with a sordid past, valiantly saves Song from two male assaulters; smitten with his bravery, Song falls in love with Jack and becomes the hula-skirted dancer in his knife-throwing act at a local cabaret, but Jack’s still hung up on his ex, a famous ballet dancer named Gloria Lee, who just happens to come to town on tour. Jack realizes the only way to win Gloria back is by buying her the diamonds and furs she covets, so he joins an ill-fated crew of train robbers who get caught, hence the title “dirty money”—money is the root of all his problems.
Jack evades arrest by hiding beneath the stalled train but the scalding excess steam streaming from the engine damages his eyes and leaves him half-blind, a serious liability when you’re in the knife-throwing business. AMW steals the money needed for the operation to restore his sight and nurses Jack back to health, even pretending to be Gloria in her castoff clothing. Jack strips off the bandages on his eyes to see that the woman he’s caressing is not Gloria, but Song. He flies into a rage and violently throws her out. TL;DR: Jack realizes too late that his faithful love was Song all along. He shows up repentant at her sword-dancing show at the Palace Hotel. Startled, Song trips and falls on one of her own swords and dies. Fin.
The plot is convoluted at best, filled with improbable twists and turns. Which is why the only way to understand the artistry of a film like this is to watch it.
Eichberg’s evocative rendering of the melodramatic storyline coupled with Anna May’s luminous performances throughout, by turns heart-wrenching, suspenseful, and comedic, make Song an unlikely triumph. Though the film was made during the waning days of German Expressionism, its visual style and camera techniques were clearly influenced by the prevailing aesthetics of the era. Expressionism as a movement rejected aspirations of cinematic realism. Instead it sought to express emotions lyrically, dramatically, through personification, metaphor, and pathetic fallacy on screen. As Samuel Harries puts it, “expressionist films showcase dramatic, revolutionary interpretations of the human condition.”
When it rains, it pours—the sky floods the streets, drenching the miserable-looking Song as she seeks refuge in Jack’s shack. The world inside the frame goes completely topsy-turvy when Jack, in a deranged fury, throws his knives recklessly across the room at Song while she scrambles out of his line of fire. And for one brief moment before her life expires, Song looks up at Jack, her one true love, glowing like an angel with a halo of light encircling her head.
In other words, the film is beautiful. A poem without words. Steve at BFI kindly re-wound all four reels so that I could watch Song a second time.
(Btw, you don’t have to travel to London to watch AMW’s films. The Gallery of Anna May Wong channel on YouTube run by dedicated AMW fan Rebecca Lee has collected a number of AMW’s films and made them available to the public. You can also watch an abbreviated version of Song posted by another film buff here.)
When I wasn’t hunkered down in a windowless screening room or holed up in a corner of the British Library with 15 years worth of Picturegoer issues, I spent my time in London pounding the pavement, retracing Anna May Wong’s footsteps across the city she came to love. At dusk one evening, I strolled down Brompton Road past Harrod’s and scores of Parisian cafes, their pastel-hued confections calling to me from gleaming window displays. I continued on through Hyde Park, crossing the trails where she once rode horses, and over to the ritzy hotels and multi-million dollar homes of Park Lane, where AMW kept a flat that overlooked the park.
Despite the constant drip of London rain, I made my way down Oxford Street where AMW partied on the rooftop of Selfridges Department Store with Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff on the night of England’s 1929 Flapper Election (the first time in British history when women ages 21-29 exercised the right to vote), and paid a visit to the Savoy Theatre, where AMW attended her friend Paul Robeson’s theatrical debut as Shakespeare’s Othello.
Over the weekend, I hopped a train down to the Knole Estate, a sprawling mansion on top of a bucolic hill in Sevenoaks, Kent. The house was the family home of Vita Sackville-West, friend and lover of Virginia Woolf, and inspired Woolf’s novel Orlando. AMW left London for this posh getaway after finishing her first run on the West End in The Circle of Chalk. Perhaps she’d been invited there by Eddy Sackville-West, one of the Bright Young Things.
On my final day in London, I treated myself to a lunch of butternut squash soup, smoked salmon, and sticky toffee pudding at the IVY—the once humble café that made its reputation by fueling London’s theatre world with chicken salad sandwiches and in return became the place to see and be seen. I sipped my sidecar and tried to imagine catching a glimpse of Anna May Wong sitting at one of the restaurant’s velvety green banquettes, holding court with the London set.
Writing a biography is like trying to assemble a massive jigsaw puzzle. Except you don’t know where all the pieces lie, and no matter your dedication, the picture will never be complete. Human beings are complex mysteries, sometimes even to themselves. Yet every day the picture becomes a little bit clearer, and another puzzle piece falls into place, another blank gets filled in.
The joy of writing about AMW has never been about knowing everything there is to know about her—because that day will never come. Rather, I relish the unexpected and felicitous discoveries I’m making along the way and the people I’m meeting, in person and over the interwebs, who have so generously offered to share their knowledge and help me in whatever ways they can.
Writing is a journey, not a destination. And if I’m honest, completing this project is something I’m simultaneously racing towards and dreading. It means winding down my dream job of getting to live vicariously through the one wild and shimmering life of Anna May Wong, and who, really, would ever want to call it quits on that?
Thanks so much for sharing this. I've only recently discovered your blog and look forward to reading them all -- and also the book, of course!
What a fantastic experience. Thank you for keeping us in the loop on hour journeys, research, and discoveries.