Anna May Wong and Her Technicolor Cheongsams

I was greeted with an unexpected surprise recently when I watched the DVD of The Good Earth (1937). The film adaptation of Pearl Buck's famous novel is mostly remembered nowadays for being the great denied opportunity of Anna May Wong's career. Before production started, there were reports of using an all-Chinese cast, including Anna May Wong, Soo Yong, and Shanghai star Hu Die. But, not surprisingly, the movie ended up featuring white actors in virtually all of the lead roles.

Anna May had been very keen to play the main character of O-Lan. It was an unprecedented chance to break out of the stereotype roles that she had been given by Hollywood throughout her career. When she was denied the role, the message could not have been more clear: Hollywood had no use for a Chinese American star.

Undoubtedly heartbroken, Anna May left at the beginning of 1936 for a nine-month tour of China. When she returned to the U.S., she appeared in the early Technicolor short Hollywood Party (1937), which is featured as an extra on The Good Earth DVD. I had no idea that Anna May appeared in this and only started watching it out of curiosity. I nearly stopped when I realized it was just a "yellow face" variety show. (Yet another missed opportunity, considering the abundance of talented Chinese American vaudeville performers.) But as I scrubbed through the film on my computer, I spotted two genuine Chinese girls on either side of a screen. I started watching again. One of the girls struck a gong, and who should emerge from behind the screen but Anna May Wong, modeling some of the exquisite cheongsams she picked up during her trip to China.

With the exception of her final film, Portrait in Black (1960) — in which she plays a maid — I believe Hollywood Party is Anna May's only other color film.* Okay, folks... here she is... the incomparable Anna May Wong in full Technicolor glory!



* I should mention that Anna May Wong does have the distinction of playing the lead in The Toll of the Sea (1922), the second two-strip Technicolor feature film ever made and the first to be given a wide release. Using only red and green, the experimental two-color process was an imperfect but impressive approximation of true color. The Toll of the Sea essentially launched Anna May's career. Just seventeen years old at the time, she was widely praised for her performance, both in the U.S. and overseas press.