Movie Stars in the Cartoonist's Eye

Check out these delightful caricatures by cartoonist P. L. Chang from the May 1934 issue of the Shanghai pictorial magazine Young Companion. For those of you who read Chinese, here are the captions. For those who can't (and that includes myself), I'll attempt to conjecture about some of the situations depicted.


Chen Yumei
Remember Chen Yumei, who battled Hu Die for the title of China's movie queen? Supposedly when rising star Hu Die left the Tianyi Film Company in 1928 and signed on with rival Mingxing, Tianyi boss Runje Shaw (the eldest of the Shaw Brothers) decided to take Chen Yumei — one of his actresses — as his second wife and make her the studio's new top star. In this way, it was rumored, the notoriously stingy Shaw wouldn't have to pay a high salary to his leading lady. Poor Chen Yumei... all she could do was dream of getting that crown, while sleeping with rats on a patched mattress.


Wang Renmei
"Wildcat" Wang Renmei had married Korean hunk (and Shanghai's "Emperor of Film") Jin Yan at the beginning of 1934. Jin Yan was an avid hunter and outdoorsman, and if this cartoon is accurate, then "Wildcat" Wang also shared his love of rifles and campfires.


Ai Xia
This cartoon shows Death coming to claim the rebellious modern girl Ai Xia, who committed suicide during the Lunar New Year of 1934. She was China's second female scriptwriter and had written and starred in the film A Woman of Today (1933) before her death. In a traqic turn of events, director Cai Chusheng — who was rumored to have had an affair with Ai and who blamed the Shanghai paparazzi for her death — made a film about her life called New Woman (1935), starring Ruan Lingyu as her fictional stand-in. The press responded to Cai's attack by hounding Ruan Lingyu, who ended up taking her own life shortly thereafter on March 15, International Women's Day. It clearly wasn't easy being a "modern woman" in modern Shanghai.


Li Minghui
A singer turned movie star, Li Minghui was the daughter of "Father of Mandopop" Li Jinhui. In 1934 she married one of China's most famous athletes, football star Lu Zhongen. To read more about Li Minghui, check out The Chinese Mirror, your one-stop shop for information (in English!) about early Chinese cinema.


Hu Die
Here's Queen Hu Die looking a little uptight. I don't know what's going on in the cartoon, but I wonder if it's a reference to Hu Die's suit against her fiance for the annulment of their long-standing engagement. She also demanded monetary compensation for being taken out of the marriage market for such a long time (I believe they were engaged for three years). According to one American newspaper account, Hu Die was "never loath to use her affairs of the heart as stepping stones for her career" (Salt Lake Tribune, March 1, 1936).


Hu Ping
All I can tell you about Hu Ping is that she played the mad woman in Song at Midnight (1937), an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera that was later remade in Hong Kong during the 90s as The Phantom Lover, starring Leslie Cheung. I'm curious to know more about her, so please leave a comment if you have any information.


Xu Lai
My buddy Oldflames helped me identify this one and was kind enough to translate the caption, in which Xu Lai says, "I couldn't live another day if I can't dance." I guess she was known for her terpsichorean passion. And to think, I only knew her as the first Chinese actress to do a bathtub scene.


Ruan Lingyu
And last but not least is our beloved Ruan Lingyu, whose winning smile and lanky beauty is perfectly captured by cartoonist P. L. Chang.

I hope you've enjoyed these as much as I have!

What If... Butterfly Wu...

Here are three intriguing "What If" scenarios that I discovered at NewspaperARCHIVE.com. The first two—not surprisingly—never came to pass, and the last thankfully never happened.

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'Mary Pickford Of China' Will Star In Six Films
by Louella O. Parsons

LOS ANGELES, July 23, 1931.—The Howard Hughes publicity department didn't have to talk long to convince me that Butterfly Wu, scheduled to make six pictures for Caddo, is a real beauty. I saw so many Orientals in Honolulu who would have photographed like Anna May Wong it's surprising we haven't had more Chinese actresses.

This Butterfly Wu is called the Mary Pickford of China and that, my friends, is the compliments of compliments, for Mary is still queen in these foreign countries. Butterfly Wu will be the star in the six pictures to be filmed in Shanghai in multicolor by Mr. Hughes.

While I suppose the appeal of these foreign made films will be greater in the Orient than in America, we shall probably see them for they are to be released for world-wide circulation.

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China's Garbo Is to Play Character in Good Earth
Butterfly Wu Is to Be Brought to Hollywood
Role in M-G-M Production of Buck's Novel
By Jerry Hoffman

LOS ANGELES, June 10, 1934.—Even China has its Garbo. Her name is Butterfly Wu and she is to come here and play the role of "O-lan" in Pearl Bucks' "Good Earth" for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This means all the talk about Helen Hayes and other American actresses is ended. Irving Thalberg has decided upon a daring experiment.

An all-Chinese cast is to play the characters of "Good Earth". Anna May Wong may be the only English speaking actress among them. Another also may be Su-Yong, a Chinese star given a film test in Honolulu by Cecil De Mille and seen by Thalberg this week. The young producer is seriously considering a daring experiment for the first time in any American made movie. Since all the players speak only Chinese, the foreign method of superimposing English titles, taken from dialogue written by Frances Marion, will be used. George Hill will direct.

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Chinese Cinema Queen Reported Hongkong Victim

CHUNGKING, CHINA, Jan. 15, 1942.—Butterfly Wu, movie queen of China, was killed by shrapnel during the siege of Hongkong, press reports said tonight.

Butterfly Wu was a beauty with brains, a romantic figure whose name had been linked with warlords, government officials, rich men, poor men, business men and actors.

When the Japanese took Manchuria in 1931, some persons blamed her, because Manchuria's overlord, the young Marshal Chang Hsueh-Liang, was being seen frequently in her company in Peiping, and wasn't in Mukden when the crisis came.

Butterfly fluttered quickly back into popularity, however, and for years tales of her "new romances" were staples of the sensational press.

In 1935 she made a triumphal tour of Russia at the soviet government's invitation, and went on to visit most of the capitals of Europe.

In 1936 she was married to Eugene Penn, a Chinese agent for a German commercial firm, in the Anglican Church in Shanghai.

She continued with her movie career, and out of her record salary of $300 a month even financed some of her own productions.

Battle of the Chinese Movie Queens

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