Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Asian Americans have been prominently involved in the
US film industry since the 1910s. While none of these
filmmakers may have thought of themselves as ‘‘Asian
Americans,’’ many of the most famous demonstrated a
racial consciousness that suggests they are ancestors of
the ethnically identified filmmakers who followed in their
footsteps. For example, after the matinee idol Sessue
Hayakawa (1889–1973) made such an impression as a
villain in The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915) he contractually required Paramount to cast him as the hero
(and often romantic lead) as often as they employed him
as a villain. When The Cheat was reissued in 1918,
Hayakawa’s character was identified as Burmese in deference to Japan’s role as a wartime ally; given that context
of racial sensitivity, it is reasonable to conclude that
Hayakawa was motivated by concerns about racial stereotyping as much as by an actor’s desire for varied roles.
With the founding of Haworth Pictures in 1918,
Hayakawa became arguably the first Asian to head a US
production company. Films such as The Dragon Painter
(1919) were set in Japan, evinced themes drawn from
Japanese philosophy, and influenced later generations of Asian American artists (for example, the jazz musician
Mark Izu, who composed a score for The Dragon Painter).
If Hayakawa struggled with the roles granted him
by Hollywood, the options open to Anna May Wong
(1905–1961) were limited still more. As a woman,
Wong was typically cast as either a ‘‘Butterfly’’ or a
‘‘Dragon Lady,’’ the specifically orientalist inflections of
the woman as victim and vamp. At the age of seventeen,
Wong starred in The Toll of the Sea (1922), Technicolor’s
first feature film using its two-strip color process. The
film’s plot was lifted from Madame Butterfly: Lotus
Flower surrenders her child to her American lover and
his white wife and then commits suicide. This was the
first of many roles in which convention dictated that
Wong’s character expire to redress the taboo of interracial
romance. Citing her frustration with such limitations,
Wong departed in 1928 for Europe, where she tackled
some of the most interesting and complex roles of her
career in films such as Schmutziges Geld (Song, 1928) and
Piccadilly (1929). Wong’s European roles were still orientalist, with her exotic sexuality emphasized in the manner of her contemporary Josephine Baker (1906–1975),
but her characters often drove the plot, exhibiting an
agency largely absent from her US roles. In the early
1930s Wong crossed the Atlantic frequently to make
films such as Shanghai Express (1932) in the United
States and Chu Chin Chow (1934) in England. After
losing the lead role in MGM’s adaptation of Pearl
S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1937) to the white actress
Luise Rainer (b. 1910), Wong traveled to China to see
her family and to study Mandarin. Wong was received
with some controversy in China, where many in the
cultural elite had disapproved of many of her film roles.
Wong’s film career was virtually ended by the mid-
1940s, although she did star in a mystery series for the
Dumont Network in 1951 (The Gallery of Madame
Lui-Tsong).
Winifred Eaton Reeve was most likely the first significant Hollywood screenwriter of Asian ancestry. Born
in Montreal in 1875 as Winifred Eaton to an English
father and a Chinese mother, Eaton adopted a Japanese
persona and published a number of best-selling novels
under the pen name Onoto Watanna in the first two
decades of the twentieth century. Arriving in New York
in 1924, she was hired to head the scenario department at
Universal’s New York headquarters, then transferred to
Hollywood the following year. She is credited with a
half-dozen screenplays in the late 1920s, most notably
Shanghai Lady (with Houston Branch, 1929) and East Is
West (with Tom Reed, 1930).
James Wong Howe (1899–1976) immigrated to the
United States from China with his family at the age of
five. Hollywood lore has it that Howe, while working as a
still photographer for Famous Players–Lasky, was championed by the actor Mary Miles Minter (1902–1984) and
given the opportunity to shoot two of her films in 1923.
Over the next fifty years, Howe shot over 125 feature
films, winning Academy Awards for The Rose Tattoo
(1955) and Hud (1962). He is known as an innovator in
deep-focus cinematography, the use of low-hung ceilings
(Transatlantic [1931]), and hand-held camera work (he
shot the boxing sequence in Body and Soul [1947] on
roller skates), and most of all for his lighting. Howe
directed only two feature films, the story of the Harlem
Globetrotters, Go, Man, Go! (1954), and Richard Derr’s
1958 portrait of Lamont Cranston, the Shadow, The
Invisible Avenger.