Daughter of Shanghai/King Of Chinatown

Anna-B

Daughter of Shanghai
aka Daughter Of The Orient
Directed by Robert Florey
USA 1937
Paramount Pictures
 
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King Of Chinatown
Directed by Nick Grinde
USA 1939
Paramount Pictures
Both screened in 35mm at NFT2 
on Saturday 20th September 2025

Warning: Some spoilers.

I’d booked three separate screenings of the Anna May Wong - The Art Of Reinvention* season at the NFT this year because I wanted to see her in more films and, honestly, three was all I could really afford, both in coin and time. And I was expecting this second visit, featuring a double bill of B movies from the late 1930s, to be a good chance to see Anna in a couple of talkies I’d not seen before, expecting her to really knock my socks off with her acting (which, to be fair, she did) and expecting not much else from them. 

What I got was so much more...

I mean, wow, these were both roughly an hour in length but they’ve got to be two of the most entertaining B movies I’ve seen in quite a while. These were rip roaringly paced aplenty and gave me an Anna May Wong I’d never seen, quite, like this before. 

For starters, she’s not talking in any stupid pidgin or broken English here... she’s fully playing a Chinese-American, born and bred in the US, just as she was in real life (the Daughter Of Shanghai title references her stage name when she goes undercover as an ‘exotic dancer’). So she just talks naturally and has a pretty amazing presence here... but in a slightly different way. Less mysterious but certainly still goddess-like. 

Also, she’s very much playing a woman of her own agency in both pictures and not some minor character or somebody doomed to die in the final act. Indeed, in Daughter Of Shanghai her part was greatly changed, tailored for her and made more important once she’d signed on the dotted line for Paramount. 

The casts in these are terrific too, for B movies. In both films, Wong’s romantic interest is played by Korean-American actor Philip Ahn, who does a really good job in both his roles... one as a police investigator and the other as a lawyer. In King Of Chinatown we have Akim Tamaroff playing a soon to be reformed, bad but getting good guy, heading up a protection racket. The real villains of both films, doubling up in tandem, are played by J. Carrol Naish and a very young Anthony Quinn. And that’s not all... in King Of Chinatown, Anna May’s father is played by Sidney Toler, just a year after he took over from the great Warner Oland as Charlie Chan. 

And, the real discovery for me... the chief henchman, a nasty piece of work... in Daughter Of Shanghai, with a moustache no less, was the great Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe. Yep, Flash Gordon himself in the same year he played Buck Rogers (which featured Ahn’s brother as the diplomat for the Saturnians, reviewed here) and was about to shoot his third and final Flash Gordon serial, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here). I’d not seen him play a villain before so this was a bit of a revelation. He was obviously trying to not let himself get typecast in certain roles, I suspect... but he does it really well. 

Daughter of Shanghai, tells a story which could easily be ripped from today’s headlines in the UK because it deals with human traffickers bringing cheap labour from overseas and forcing people to take them on in employment for bed and board (while getting rich off the fee to get them safely into the US). We see how ruthless they are at the start because, on the plane crossing over to America, when a government aircraft starts following them, they pull a lever and, in the back of the plane, the floor opens and drops the hopeful people to their death. 

Anna May plays the daughter of a prosperous store in Chinatown but, her father is killed when he starts to investigate the people who are threatening him to take in illegal immigrants and... well, the villains think Anna May’s character Lan Ying Lin is dead also, but she outsmarts them and gets away without them even realising it (she manages to pull this trick off twice, when left for dead in this movie). Then, rather then wait for Ahn to find out who is behind the smuggling ring, she goes undercover and abroad, finding out for herself before being rescued by Ahn and then returning to America to find the real ring leader. At which point the film turns into shooting and fist fights which would not look out of place in the best of the Republic serials. It’s... as I said... rip roaring stuff.

In King Of Chinatown, Wong plays successful surgeon Dr. Mary Ling, who saves the life and, looks after, Akim Tamaroff’s character... partially because she thinks her dad might have been responsible for the shooting in the first place and partially because she wants the money he’s paying her privately to look after him to fund her hospital when she goes to China. And it’s another brilliant story with double crosses, a fixed boxing match and, surprisingly, a whole lot of heart coming from Tamaroff’s mob boss, who is inspired by the good doctor to change his ways and turn over a new leaf. So... of course he gets killed before the end... the reach of the Hays Code strikes again. No crime unpunished... and all that.

Both films were presented in 35mm prints on loan and, honestly, I was absolutely in love with these two movies as I watched them. These both deserve decent, UK Blu Ray releases, for sure. 

My one big disappointment of the day was what the BFI did at the start of the screening... which made my blood boil. On a notice outside the door they’d put up a so called ‘trigger warning’. It read, "DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI + KING OF CHINATOWN. King Of Chinatown contains racist attitudes, language and images including yellowface." This last, I suspect, referring to Sydney Toler’s make-up**. Honestly, these warnings really get under my skin. Are the woke brigade so unbelievably stupid that they can’t watch a movie in the context of its time. How crazy is this? I mean, if I was an ace surgeon and I went to that screening, would I be shocked that Anna May Wong was pretending to be a surgeon and maybe getting some stuff wrong? No. So why are people getting so sensitive when an actor is able to effectively pretend to be from another race. This stuff is crazy and these censors of public attitudes should be stopped. 

So, yeah, that put a slight krimp in my evening. But, honestly, Daughter Of Shanghai and King Of Chinatown were such good movies that my spirits soon lifted and I enjoyed the heck out of them (and I already want to see them again). So if you get the opportunity to check these ones out, do so is the advice I would give. 

*Alas, it was not to be. Real life stuff has caught up to me in the most unpleasant manner and I am now unable to attend that last screening, which was to be the day this blog post is published. To say I'm gutted would be an understatement.

**Also, I should probably point out here that Toler’s make-up, aphorisms and broken English further push the idea in the movie that the father is originally from China and is used to contrast Wong’s ‘born in America’ attitude towards the world... so yeah, not only effective but it serves a purpose.