Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, Olive Young (杨爱立) went to Shanghai and became one of Chinese cinema's earliest film stars. She died in Bayonne, New Jersey, at the age of 37 after collapsing in the dressing room of the nightclub where she was performing as a blues singer. Stay tuned for my attempt to piece together her mysterious life.
Ever hear of painted knees? Nope? Me neither. Evidently it was quite the fashion accessory for flappers back in '25. Reminds me of the body painting of the sixties. I guess the flappers were the original mod girls.
The following headline and blurb accompanied this cute photo of Anna May, which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on August 1, 1925:
Painted Monkey Graces Knee of Almond-Eyed Film Star Anna May Wong, Chinese screen actress, who has adopted the fad of having her knees painted. The much-discussed evolution monkey adorns Anna May's limbs.
Pretty cool, huh! However, I'm of the opinion that it's not Scopes' monkey who's climbing Anna May's calf — but mischievous Sun Wukong, the Monkey King!
Anna May sure loved her cars. One of her first was a six-cylinder Willys-Knight, which she wrecked on a bridge trying to evade a motorcycle cop. Below is a little piece about a Buick she bought in 1924 — perhaps as a replacement for that Willys-Knight!
CLEVER LITTLE CHINESE MOVIE STAR JOINS FAMILY OF BUICK OWNERS
Anna May Wong, the little Oriental film star who is taking a prominent part in the support of Douglas Fairbanks in "A Thief of Bagdad", spends her leisure hours in motoring.
The above picture of little Miss Wong was caught by the photographer while she was taking a "constitutional" in her favorite car, a Buick.
— San Antonio Express, June 22, 1924
P.S. I just found the following driving-related item about Anna May from The Oxnard Daily Courier (February 3, 1925). Seems like she was a bit of a daredevil!
Anna May Wong, a well known Chinese actress of Los Angeles, was arrested in Ventura Saturday night. She was driving at the rate of 35 miles an hour and will appear before Judge Meilandt tomorrow.
Now you can fall in love over and over again with the eminently photogenic Anna May Wong at Anna May, a new tumblr recently set up by Rebecca of Anna May Wong Daily.
I absolutely adore these "photo-cartoons" of Anna May. If anyone knows anything about who made them and where they were published, do let me know.
This postcard is for Loreto, who recently posted about Art Deco illustrator Rafael de Penagos. Penagos had a penchant for drawing flappers and modern girls, so much so that "la mujer Penagos" (the Penagos woman) became the emblem of the new woman in Spanish culture. As Loreto points out, the bathing beauty on the beach symbolized the emergence of women in the public sphere. The woman on the beach charted a new freedom of movement, both in relation to physical space and to the physicality of her own body.
I'm not sure who this lady is, but I'm wondering if she may be 1920s Shanghai actress Ni Hongyan (if DJ of The Chinese Mirror is reading this, maybe he can identify her). In any case, she is definitely a sister of "la mujer Penagos".
It's safe to say, considering the puzzling lack of legitimate DVD releases for many of her films (Shanghai Express, anyone?), that a lot of folks nowadays have become acquainted with Anna May Wong through her myriad portraits rather than her movies. Let's face it: Anna May Wong was extremely photogenic. The camera loved her, and so did a host of famous photographers, from George Hurrell to Carl Van Vechten.
Here's a series of Anna May Wong "photo-cartoons" of which I am particularly fond. They date from 1928, when Anna May left the U.S. to make a name for herself in Europe. I know nothing about their creator or the circumstances of their creation. All I know is that they are absolutely charming, playfully capturing Anna May's humor and love of dressing up.
Joseph Sunn Jue was truly a motion picture pioneer. Besides producing the second-ever Cantonese talkie (Romance of the Songsters, 1933), the first Cantonese color feature* (White Powder and Neon Lights, 1947), one of the first Chinese movies shown in 3-D (A Woman's Revenge, 1953), and the first Chinese movie shot in Cinemascope (New Story of Yu Tang Chun, 1954), he also created several claymation shorts for animator Ralph Wolfe's "Mud Stuff" series in 1926.
Three of these shorts are available online at the Internet Archive, as part of the Prelinger Archives. The shorts are silent, but a couple of creative and enterprising individuals have added soundtracks and posted the results on YouTube. I must say that the new scores really bring these films to life!
First up is "The Penwiper", with music by Tedd Smith and his group The Flying Monkeys.
Next is "Green Pastures", with sound effects provided by Coolympia.
Here are links to the original, uncut films, as well as a third short, "Long Live the Bull!"
*Fei Mu's Remorse at Death (1948), starring Mei Lan-fang, is generally cited as the first Chinese color film, but Jue's White Powder and Neon Lights (1947) arguably deserves that distinction, even though it was a Cantonese-language film, shot on 16mm, and produced in the United States. Furthermore, although the film was released in Hong Kong in 1947, it was actually shot in San Francisco in 1941 (according to Cantonese Opera Film Retrospective, a catalog of the 1987 HKIFF film series).
I recently discovered the little known history of Chinese American vaudeville performers thanks to Krystyn R. Moon's fascinating book Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s and am currently in the thick of researching two of its pioneering stars, Lady Tsen Mei and Princess Jue Quon Tai. I'm planning on posting about the two of them in the coming weeks, but in the meantime here is a little something about a singer named Anna Chang, "a vivacious little Chinese prima donna who certainly knows how to get the blues out of American songs" (Syracuse Herald, April 8, 1928).
"A product of San Francisco", Miss Chang started singing when she was six years old, and "ere long she was well versed in American popular songs of the period" (San Antonio Light, July 28, 1929). As far as I can tell, she made her debut with Paul Ash and his Granada Orchestra at the Granada Theater in San Francisco, probably sometime in 1924, when she could also be heard on the Oakland Tribune's Radio KLX, singing popular tunes like "Dancin' Dan". In 1928, Chang toured the United States with the variety revue "Hula Blues", "a new kind of Hawaiian beauty show, which entrances its auditors with its soft, melting harmony, and twanging ukuleles" (Suburbanite Economist, June 15, 1928).
The following year, Chang starred with Hatsu Kuma in a Paramount musical short, Two Little Chinese Maids (1929). Three years later, she made another one-reeler for Paramount called Singapore Sue (1932), which featured Chinese American vaudevillian Joe Wong, Pickard's Chinese Syncopators, and a young Cary Grant in his first film appearance. Here is a clip of Chang singing "How Can a Girl Say No?" and saying "no" to Grant, a cocky sailor who tries to woo her but ends up with a squirt in the face!
I've been unable to find out what happened to Chang in the wake of her flash-in-the-pan Hollywood career. But in 1941 she was back in San Francisco, headlining at the Jade Palace and staking her place as the "Chinese Princess of Song" in the city's vibrant nightclub scene. Filmmaker Arthur Dong has made an amazing documentary called Forbidden City, USA, which tells the story of the performers at Charlie Low's Forbidden City nightclub during that time. Still, there is much research to be done to fully recover the rich history of Chinese American vaudeville. Thankfully, Singapore Sue has survived to give us a glimpse of one of its shining stars.
* Lead photo of Anna Chang from Vaudeville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America
Deejay over at The Chinese Mirror has been posting recently about some of the earliest Chinese feature films, and it's quite interesting to see that they are not so different from contemporary Hong Kong films. Take for example Women Skeletons (1922), the first Chinese detective film. It features a gang of prostitutes called the Ten Sisters who prowl Shanghai and lure unsuspecting men with easy sex before robbing them. More than seventy years later, a film like Six Devil Women (1996) proves that movie prostitutes are still as sexy and dangerous as they were back in the old days.
Or how about Yan Ruisheng (1921), the first Chinese true-crime film. It was based on a sensational case from the previous year, involving one of Shanghai's top courtesans who was murdered by her client, a respectable and prominent man about town. Fast forward to the 90s, and audiences are still fascinated by the exploits of real-life murderers, such as Dr. Lamb (1992).
Another early true-crime film, Zhang Xinsheng (1922), reputedly featured autopsy scenes so graphic that audiences left the theater. Take that, Dr. Lamb! Long before there was even a Category III rating, Chinese filmmakers were already catering to the "vulgar" tastes of the public and pushing the boundaries of acceptability.
I wasn't trying, but I dug up some dirt about actress Chen Yumei, who I blogged about the other day. In my previous post I had reported that she was first runner-up to Hu Die for the title of China's "Movie Queen" in a 1933 newspaper contest. Well, it seems that the rivalry between Miss Chen and Miss Hu carried over the following year. Surprisingly, the story was picked up by U.S. newspapers. According to an article in The Ogden Standard Examiner (May 27, 1934):
Warlords and bandits may ravage the back country, and the Japanese may be consolidating their conquest of the border provinces — but amid all of these distractions, China has found the time and energy to get all wrought up about a row between two movie actresses....
The trouble all started when one of the newspapers in Shanghai conducted a straw ballot for the title of "Movie Queen of 1934" — thus proving that the ways of the press agent are not entirely unknown in the ancient land of the dragon.
At the conclusion of this campaign the title was awarded to Miss Cheng [Chen Yumei], who in private life is Mrs. Shao Tsui-ong, wife of the managing director of the Unique Film Co.
Immediately the storm arose. Most of the other newspapers in Shanghai jumped into the argument with both feet, denouncing the vote as a fraud and asserting stoutly that the title ought to have gone to Miss Wu [Hu Die]. They pointed out that a picture, "Two Sisters," starring Miss Wu [and produced by Mingxing Film Company], played to full houses at the Strand Theater for two months, every seat being sold at every performance — an all-time high record for movie attendance in China.
Although Chen Yumei was undoubtedly a popular actress, it does seem unlikely that she could have beat Hu Die for the title of "Movie Queen". Furthermore, it turns out that her second-best win in the 1933 contest (which placed her ahead of Ruan Lingyu) was generally regarded a result of Runje Shaw's manipulation. So, you can imagine the outrage when she was announced the winner of the 1934 contest.
I don't know how the ensuing "row" was resolved, but nowadays Hu Die is firmly enshrined as "Movie Queen" in the firmament of Chinese cinema, while Chen Yumei seems to be dismissed as a mistress turned movie star. In fact, it's said that when Hu Die left Runje Shaw's Unique Film Company in 1928 and signed on with rival Mingxing Film Company, Runje decided to take Chen Yumei as his second wife and make her the top star of his studio. In this way, the notoriously stingy Runje could "save on actors' pay and prevent their pay from somersaulting once they became big stars" (Chung).
Whether or not this is true is beyond me, but it's obvious that the rivalry between Unique and Mingxing played out in the annual battle of the Chinese "Movie Queens".
Further Reading
"The Industrial Evolution of a Fraternal Enterprise: The Shaw Brothers and the Shaw Organization" by Stephanie Chung Po-yin in The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study
"Shanghai's Unique Film Productions and Hong Kong's Early Cinema" by Zhou Chengren in The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study
I love eBay. Although it lacks the permanence of a traditional archive, I cherish the chance encounters I'm afforded in its fluid and neverlasting virtual repository of Chinese movie ephemera. I've learned so much from following the lead of some star photo or movie flyer that I've seen listed. For example, take this photograph of Chen Yumei, which just went up for auction the other day. Even though I'm pretty familiar with the major stars of early Chinese cinema, I had no idea who she was. Of course, this evident gap in my knowledge only made me determined to find out about her.
A Google book search revealed that the answer lurked within a few books in my personal library. It turns out that Chen Yumei is none other than the wife of Renji Shaw, the eldest of the Shaw brothers. In 1925 Renji Shaw founded Tianyi Film Company (also known as Unique Film Company), the first incarnation of the production arm of the Shaw Brothers movie empire. Chen Yumei was one of the studio's first stars (along with movie queen Hu Die) and made some thirty-odd films from 1926 until her retirement in 1934. It seems that her film debut was Tang Bohu Woos Qiuxiang* (唐伯虎點秋香), the first (?) silver screen adaptation of the legendary "flirting scholar" Tang Bohu. If you're like me, you may be more familiar with this story from later versions, such as the Shaw Brothers' huangmei opera film The Three Smiles (1969) or Stephen Chow's hilarious and irreverent Flirting Scholar (1993).
Anyway, I'd love to know more about Chen Yumei. She was evidently quite popular. According to Michael Chang's "The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s-1930s", Chen was the first runner-up in a 1933 contest sponsored by Mingxing Daily to determine China's "Movie Queen". (Hu Die took the crown and Ruan Lingyu came in third.) As far as I know, none of her films have survived, but there are some intriguing titles in her filmography, like a 1928 film called King Boxer (拳大王) and a Chinese version (亞森羅賓) of Arsène Lupin, the famous fictional French thief.
Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View by Law Kar and Frank Bren
"The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s-1930s" by Michael G. Chang in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 edited by Yingjin Zhang
*A big thanks to Deejay at The Chinese Mirror for correcting the English translation of Chen Yumei's first film!
In 2003 the UCLA Film & Television Archive organized Heroic Grace, a retrospective of classic Chinese martial arts films. Opening the series was the feature-length sixth episode of the 13-part serial Red Heroine. Made in Shanghai in 1929, this episode is the earliest surviving martial arts film of the silent era.
I'm very excited to report that Devil Music Ensemble has created an original score for Red Heroine and will be performing live with the film this fall on a 29-date, cross-country tour. This is a rare opportunity to witness the roots of one of Chinese cinema's most popular genres. Check out the trailer below and mark your calendars!
Further Reading Heroic Grace program catalog [PDF file, 6.3 MB] Jean Lukitsh's "The Origins of Kung Fu Cinema", parts 1, 2, 3, and 4
"A product of San Francisco", Miss Chang started singing when she was six years old, and "ere long she was well versed in American popular songs of the period" (San Antonio Light, July 28, 1929). As far as I can tell, she made her debut with Paul Ash and his Granada Orchestra at the Granada Theater in San Francisco, probably sometime in 1924, when she could also be heard on the Oakland Tribune's Radio KLX, singing popular tunes like "Dancin' Dan". In 1928, Chang toured the United States with the variety revue "Hula Blues", "a new kind of Hawaiian beauty show, which entrances its auditors with its soft, melting harmony, and twanging ukuleles" (Suburbanite Economist, June 15, 1928).
I've been unable to find out what happened to Chang in the wake of her flash-in-the-pan Hollywood career. But in 1941 she was back in San Francisco, headlining at the Jade Palace and staking her place as the "Chinese Princess of Song" in the city's vibrant nightclub scene. Filmmaker Arthur Dong has made an amazing documentary called Forbidden City, USA, which tells the story of the performers at Charlie Low's Forbidden City nightclub during that time. Still, there is much research to be done to fully recover the rich history of Chinese American vaudeville. Thankfully, Singapore Sue has survived to give us a glimpse of one of its shining stars.
