Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American movie star, was already famous — a Hollywood mainstay since the silent film era who first appeared on screen at 14 back in 1919 — when World War II broke out.
With the United States now allied with China in the Pacific War against imperialist Japan, that could have been a golden era of opportunities for an established star with her exotic good looks and experience.
But it wasn’t. American films about the long-running Second Sino-Japanese War made during WWII were rare, and she wasn’t cast in John Wayne’s “Flying Tigers,” then and now the most obvious story to sell to American audiences. China’s ongoing civil war, with war lords holding the balance of power between the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Communists of Mao Zedong, made it a messy, unreliable ally, and not the most promising source of Hollywood stories.
And the same racism that kept Wong from landing the lead in MGM’s Peal Buck China epic “The Good Earth” in the ’30s (Caucasian actors in “yellow face” got those parts) limited her to a couple of war films as her film career — she also did a lot of acting for radio — went into steep decline. She is celebrated today for her ground-breaking representation as much as her movies.
“Lady from Chungking” (1942) was her last starring role, and like her next-to-last starring role, her other WWII film, “Bombs Over Burma,” it’s a short feature filmed quickly and cheaply for Producers Releasing Corporation, A Hollywood “poverty row” distributor. She was only 37 when it came out.
Her presence in the film is the only thing that justifies labeling it a “classic. But it’s a fascinating very early exercise in serving up what would become a genre “resistance” story, this one set in China and built around a formidable leading lady.
It was directed by a prolific B-movie filmmaker with little sense of style, but often used on cheap thrillers with Asian (often played by “yellow face” Caucasian) characters and settings. The sets look like Old West haciendas repurposed as Chinese. The film opens in a rice paddy, damned hard to fake in sunbaked SoCal, then and now. And the aircraft in a prolonged dogfight sequence that opens the film seem about a dozen years out of date.
Wong is Kwan Mei, posing as a simple “Coolie,” forced to labor in the rice fields under an armed Japanese overseer (Angelo Cruz. Ahem.). She is quick to slyly intervene when co-workers and children are threatened, polished in knowing how to quote Japanese propaganda like the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” that they labeled their conquests.
Kwan Mei is leader of a resistance cell. She decides when to kill that overseer, by whose hand it will be and by what method — knife.
She’s got her eyes on the bigger prize. She’ll play passive and cooperative with the Japanese Lieutenant (Ted Hecht, cough cough), play along with his scheme to set her up as of “noble” birth, catnip to his incoming boss, General Kaimura (Harold Huber). She knows her “duty to the New Order.” And she wants to get closer to this “butcher.”
A couple of Flying Tigers — U.S. volunteer combat airmen — getting shot down right over that rice paddy complicate this plot. Rick Vallin and Paul Bryar play the one “those dirty little nips plugged” and the one “the nips” capture.
She needs to win over the obsequios German (Ludwig Donath) who “Heil Hitlers” the Japanese, always admitting “‘Banzai!’ is much better!” He’s a “businessman” who plays both sides of the conflict.
Then there’s the matter of luring the general away from the Anglo-Russian blonde saloon singer (Mae Clark, who was also in “Flying Tigers”).
But Kwan Mei is nothing if not resourceful, and seductive and cunning. She doses the general’s drink and asks him about the invading force he’s bringing up from The South.
“Yes, by the thousands, and within 24 hours! But let’s not talk about that now,” he admits, in his best Frank Drebin.
The plot is “flag waver” simple, the characters “stock” and despite the occasional Asian face in the cast, too many of those characters are played by Gringos. Or Latinos.
Wong doesn’t exactly dazzle in the lead. But she manages to come off as formidable and calculating. Friends and relatives will be sacrificed in pursuit of her partisan goals. Her loyalty will be questioned. But you know who’s going to have the gun in her hand when it counts. It’s not much of a picture, but she carries it.
Bit parts and poverty row pics from this stage of her career onwards are no way to judge Wong’s talents and the potential that Hollywood never let her live up to. Her best silents and mid-30s dramas and thrillers suggest the star who might have been and the representation that might have made a bigger difference in a Hollywood reluctant to truly look like the American Melting Pot, and give every corner of the culture someone it could identify with on screen.
Rating: TV-PG, violence
Cast: Anna May Wong, Harold Huber, Mae Clark, Rick Vallin, Ted Hecht, Walter Soo Hoo, James B. Leong, Archie Got, Paul Bryar and Ludwig Donath.
Credits: Directed by William Nigh, scripted by Sam Robin. A Producers Releasing Corp. release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:06
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