Tiger Bay


Director: J. Elder Wills
Year: 1934
Rating: 6.0

It is late in the evening and a group of bored British ex-pats are lounging around a club drinking gin and soda stuck in the heat and morass of French Guyana. One of them ventures that there is romance to be found among the natives and lower classes and asks about the area of town called Tiger Bay. An old hand answers him "Tiger Bay is home to all the riffraff of the Seven Seas. Negroes, Lascars, Chinese, Arabs". Not to mention bars, prostitutes and trouble. And Anna May Wong.



Certainly no place for an English gentleman. But of course to a young man like Michael (Victor Garland) this is an enticement. So he wanders down among all the scallywags, drunks, offers from the kind ladies of the night, blacks high stepping it and others gambling and is fascinated. It is rather a wonderfully jumbled extremely diverse world that is painted here especially in 1934. Apparently, they were going to place the story in Limehouse (the location of another Anna May Wong film called Piccadilly), but the British government wasn't keen on that so they moved it to the tropics run by the French.



The young man strolls into a bar that smells like excitement - a piano player banging away on the keys draped with assorted women around him, couples who just found each other dancing away, drunks stealing drinks, louts laughing and carousing - a fun night out. There is also an exotic Asian woman dancing on stage. She is the owner though - having been brought here by her father during the Chinese Revolution - and they brought along the child of a British friend when both parents were killed - a blonde cherub now grown into a woman that Lui wants to protect from all of this. But it's Tiger Bay and trouble is around every corner. When a giant of a man goes after Letty the British gent jumps in like Sir Galahad only to get stabbed for his trouble. Love blooms between Michael and Letty and I am like hey - that is Anna May Wong next to her - are you nuts.



There isn't much of a plot here as it runs only 65 minutes and what there is isn't very good - but the milieu that is created is rather enjoyable full of off-beat characters like Stumpy with the peg leg or the guy who whistles like a bird and just a constant stream of people coming and going of every race. This was produced by an English company called Wyndham and directed by J. Elder Wills, who decades later was to direct The Quatermass Xperiment, The Glass Tomb and Four Sided Triangle. Co-editing this film is a fellow named David Lean.



Anna May Wong was to bounce back and forth from the USA to Europe making films. America was her home and so she always returned hoping that her success in Europe where she was enormously popular would get her good roles, but they never really did. A star away from home but just a Chinese actress in Hollywood. In 1928 she was brought to Europe by an offer and made a few films in England, the afore mentioned Piccadilly being terrific. She returned to Paramount and made three films - two B films and then as a supporting actor in the classic Shanghai Express with Dietrich and then back to England to make three films. in which she was top billed.



Also perhaps of some mild interest is the actress who plays Letty, Rene Ray, who was to act until the late 1950's, wrote a few bestsellers and married a count at some point.