Java Head

Anna Mae Wong gets one of the final roles worthy of her in this adaptation of Joseph Hergesheimer's novel which manages to sail the high seas without ever leaving Ealing and constitutes the fifth and final of five films she made in Britain.

Although Miss Mae Wong as "a heathen Chinese" married to an Englishman introduced to a horrified Nineteenth century Britain doesn't even appear until nearly halfway through the film she gets top billing, making an unlikely team with English rose Elizabeth Allan, their names appear before Edmond Gwenn and John Loder who come in at third and fourth with Ralph Richardson coming up at the rear at fifth in the cast list.

This film is made great by the presence of Anna May Wong and some B actors of the period. She holds up this film from beginning to end with a bravado performance (certainly one worthy of a nomination). But the 1930s was a different world. Chinese actresses didnt get nominations for great performances; they didnt even get roles custom-made for Chinese actresses, like the lead in The Good Earth, which would have been even better with Wong in the lead. Even though Louise Rainer won the Oscar that year, and turned in a wonderful performance, Wong would have been perfect for the role of a lifetime. This film is your usual triangle, but with a few twists. Wong must face all the prejudices of Western society that considered her a savage, when it was actually the other way around. The film is also a tragedy, as well as a soap, but I will not reveal why. A top Wong performance.

Not at all cinematic, and rather stiffly dramatic, but a fascinating look at times past and changing mores. There's plenty of ripe, humorous seafaring dialogue, some hilarious comic cutaways about sea life and hypocritical moralism, and plenty of unverbalized, precode references to opium addiction and other vices. Anna May Wong has one of her finest roles, showing more dignity in her character than the hypocritical churchgoers, and Elizabeth Allan is a romantic ideal as always.

This is a film adaptation of Joseph Hergesheimer's best-selling novel of 1919, JAVA HEAD. (A silent film adaptation had appeared in 1923 which may possibly not survive.) The film is set in the late 1820s in the port city of Bristol, England (in the 1923 film it was Salem, Massachusetts). There is one remarkable scene where we see a sailing ship heading out to sea by passing under the Clifton Suspension Bridge which was then still in a state of construction (it was finished in 1831). I don't know how they managed that special effect. The film's two main female characters are played by Elizabeth Allan and the spell-binding Anna May Wong. One reason why the film is so convincing is that the irrepressible Edmund Gwenn plays Captain Jeremy Ammidon, an old salt who now owns a large shipping company. He has named his house Java Head, after the dramatic Java Head, well known to all sailors, at the far western end of Java, opposite Sumatra. The film is enlivened by his fantastic dialogue, which I presume may have been lifted from the novel. Everything he says is expressed nautically, whatever the subject. It is astonishing and thoroughly delightful. When he visits a friend who has been ill in bed but is recovering, he says: 'I'm sorry you were on the rocks, but glad you are now afloat again.' John Loder and Ralph Richardson play his two sons, one a bold sailor (John Loder) and the other a mere landlubber who stays behind and manipulates the business in somewhat unscrupulous ways. He wants also to modernise and buy some Yankee Clipper Ships. I can sympathise with that; several of my ancestors from Bristol were captains of those very vessels, the name being Collins. The Collinses were a maritime Bristol family who can be traced back to the 1300s, at which point such records fail. But they were always there, owning wharves, making sails, building ships, and captaining ships to Spain for sherry and Portugal for port, and later crossing back and forth to America on their Yankee Clippers. In short, this film could have been of some of my own forebears. In the story, Loder sails to Shanghai (round the Cape) and comes back with a surprise, a Chinese wife! She is in fact a Manchu princess, played by Anna May Wong with great restraint. Her manners and her dress are otherworldly. At first sight, the residents of Bristol are shocked and horrified, having never seen anyone Chinese before, and the racial prejudice is so extreme it is really totally shocking, though I suppose thoroughly accurate. And Elizabeth Allan plays a young woman who has always been in love with Loder, so there are love complications. This film is really very educational as well as absorbing in the dramatic sense. Recommended to all!

This is a fairly ordinary tale of a romantic triangle, elevated to an A picture by the presence of Anna May Wong, a gifted and tragic American-Chinese actress of the 1930s.

The plot involves rivalry between seafaring trader families and internal squabbles between brothers, one who wants to "modernise" the firm with steamships and opium smuggling, and another who is decent, in love with a local girl yet marries a Manchu princess ... yup, Anna May.

I kind of get the impression that the script for this film was re-jigged somewhat when the producers knew they had Ms Wong. Consequently, she seems to have wandered in from another film. The brief flash of pre-code nudity seems strangely out of place, but it's interesting how much more liberal the movies of the early 1930s can be.

In this picture, AMW's regal bearing and striking looks dominate the screen whenever she's on. Though it's not her best picture by a country mile (I reserve that for DANGEROUS TO KNOW), any Ms Wong is well worth a look.