When I was growing up, Marvel Comics had a series called What If? that proposed alternate reality scenarios such as "What if Invisible Girl of the Fantastic Four married the Sub-Mariner?" and "What if Aunt May had been bitten by the Radioactive Spider?" As a film geek, I often find myself creating "What If?" movie scenarios in my head. My most recent one was inspired by a tantalizing tidbit from a 1950 interview with the legendary Bai Guang in Movie News, an English-language film magazine published in Singapore.
[Bai Guang] confessed that she... HAS NO "crush" on Orson Welles, and explained by saying: "He's the one person in the world I would really like to meet and talk to because he's... what do you call it... a genius. I want to know what he thinks of my ability as an actress and whether there's any worthwhile future in it for me if I were to carry on. Of course I would love to appear in a picture with him—preferably in one on the lines of "Casablanca," "Malaya," "Morocco," or the "The Lady from Shanghai" where I can have a small part in a cafe scene and sing a song or two."
Now that is a film that I'd love to see! The combination of Hollywood "bad boy" Orson Welles and Hong Kong "femme noir" Bai Guang would be as potent as sambal tempoyak, a Sumatran specialty made from fermented durian, coconut milk, dried anchovies, and red hot chili sauce. I'm already drooling just thinking about it!
I'll post the rest of the interview later this week, as well as something interesting I just found out about The Lady from Shanghai.
* Photograph of Orson Welles by Carl Van Vechten from the Van Vechten Collection at the Library of Congress
0 comments:
Post a Comment