Lady from Chungking
Director: William
Nigh
Year: 1942
Rating: 6.0
In the same year that Anna May Wong made Bombs
Over Burma, she made this Poverty Row production as well. During the war
years she focused on doing what she could for China - raising money, organizing
efforts to help them, being a strong voice for them. So she cut way back
on her film career though in truth it was already hitting major roadblocks
because of her ethnicity. As had happened to her in Mr. Wu opposite Lon Chaney
in 1927, Anna was rejected for two plum Chinese roles in the film Son-Daughter
(1932) and The Good Earth (1937) because the studio thought she looked too
Chinese - instead giving the roles to Helen Hayes and the Austrian star Louis
Rainer. After this she left for England where she had made the wonderful
Piccadilly years before, but she had to come back to fulfill her contract.
Both Lady and Bombs were simply part of the war effort to her. She was not
to make another film until 1949.
For a very low budget film that reeks of cheapness, the script is actually
not too bad as a tight slice of anti-Japanese propaganda and pro-Chinese
war effort with dialogue that has its moments. There are a few quite effective
scenes as well - the execution of a few elderly Chinese peasants, Wong's
scene with the Japanese general and her final speech about China rising again.
The Japanese are of course portrayed as swine but General Kaimura (played
by Harold Huber barely even bothering to try and look Asian) is given a more
complex character than one might expect in a film like this. Wong is a high
class personage who disguises herself as a coolie and is leading a group
of partisans against the invaders. She wants to seduce information out of
the General as to troop movements so that they can blow up the train. There
are also two American flyers - Flying Tigers - who had to bail out and I
thought - oh here we go - they will take over the film but that doesn't happen.
Wong continues to be the main character.
Also on hand as a Russian singer is Mae Clarke who sadly by this time had
also fallen into B filmland. She was a reasonably big star some ten years
before - the famous scene in Public Enemy of Cagney pushing the grapefruit
into her face is iconic - and also had top roles in Front Page, Waterloo
Bridge and Frankenstein - but the vagaries of life, changing taste and a
few accidents threw her career off course never to really recover.
