A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Daughter of the Dragon (Lloyd Corrigan, 1931)









Cast: Anna May Wong, Warner Oland, Sessue Hayakawa, Bramwell Fletcher, Frances Dade, Holmes Herbert, Lawrence Grant, Harold Minjir, Nicholas Soussanin, E. Alyn Warren. Screenplay: Lloyd Corrigan, Monte M. Katterjohn, Sidney Buchman, based on a novel by Sax Rohmer. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Music: Rudolph G. Kopp, John Leipold.

It won’t do, of course, these sinister Asians and hapless Europeans all under the spell of Dr. Fu Manchu (Warner Oland in yellowface – his last outing in the role). But although today it’s more artifact than art and more likely to elicit guffaws than shudders, Daughter of the Dragon does give us a needed glimpse into what we are: a country always likely to fall into suspicions about the Other. The rise of Asian-bashing after the emergence of Covid, which our ineffable president persisted in calling “the China virus,” should be enough to remind us of that. Otherwise, the movie is a welcome opportunity to view the talents of Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa, two of the most important Asian actors to emerge in the silent era and to continue their careers on the margins of Hollywood film in the sound era.