My favorite quote from Tallulah Bankhead, courtesy Mark Viera's Forbidden Hollywood, is this one: "When I first started to make pictures, I was said to be trying to 'do a Garbo.' A fatal thing to say about anyone. If there's anything the matter with me now, it's certainly not Hollywood's state of mind about me. The matter with me is I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months is a long, long while. I want a man!"
It was just one year after making The Cheat that Bankhead, frustrated with living in Hollywood and the studio trying to force her into the mold of Garbo, would leave Hollywood. As her credit list is so short, it was a joy to see her here, crooning "I'll see you in my dreams" in her sultry voice, and wearing shimmering gowns. She plays a woman who is in a good marriage, but who spends and gambles too much money while her husband (Harvey Stephens) is off trying to strike it rich through his business ventures. A lady's man who has returned from Asia (Irving Pichel) has his eye on her, thus setting up conflict. He's quite brazen in his approach, leading to this exchange:
"Are you in love with your husband?" "Yes. Isn't it too bad?" "Not necessarily."
Now it's not that she doesn't have sizzle with her husband, as at one point he caresses her face and says "I'm not your husband," and when she replies "Gracious!" he says "I'm your lover," then plants a long, lingering kiss on her.
Meanwhile, the other man smugly lets her see is "gallery of ghosts," which are figurines made of each of the women who were "kind" to him, meaning all the women he's bedded. He also tells her he brands all of his belongings with a Japanese character that means "I possess." Rather than fleeing from this creepy dude (who incidentally looks just like Mike Meyers), she asks to see more, wondering if he has a "head strung up in a closet" behind a door, when in fact when he slides the door open we see two musicians who immediately begin playing traditional Chinese instruments. He then tries to give her a beautiful, ornate gown that belonged to a "Siamese princess," the references coming fast and furious from all over Asia. As the film progresses, he continues to pursue her like a jungle cat stalking its prey, and when he overhears her having lost a fortune on an ill-advised stock gamble, pounces.
Unfortunately, in the pervasive feeling of superiority and exoticism of Asian cultures, there are certainly elements of racism. The telltale warning sign comes in the credits, with the "Chinese style" English writing announcing the cast and crew. Early on Pichel's character confides to another that "The Oriental woman isn't really a slave, she's simply been well-trained." Later he tells Bankhead's character that "Opium has never agreed with me, but some of us (in Asia) use it as you would cigarettes," echoing an aspect of the "Yellow peril" propaganda that also conveniently overlooked Britain's role in forcing opium on the Chinese people.
While touring his mansion, she takes one look at his statue of the Hindu-Buddhist deity Yama concealed behind a hidden door and says, "Oh, how dreadful." While he says "that depends on your point-of-view" and explains to her that it's their god of destruction, he of course doesn't explain any of the philosophical nuance, e.g. That it represents inevitable impermanence more than anything else, and we just get a tight shot of the god's rather sinister face. Later a group of affluent white people will put on an "Oriental" themed bazaar (following the previous year's Native American theme), where the cultures and dance are jumbled together for merriment, while the only real Asian people we see are servants.
The would-be lover may be white, but he's certainly a surrogate for Asians, having been corrupted by their ways, cruelly wanting to possess (and literally brand!) women, and being crafty and deviously unpredictable. The wife represents wayward, sinful women, those who don't know a good thing when they've got it, and whose morals may bend when necessary. The upright husband, the one who would much rather travel to Western Europe, thus does moralistic double duty, to defeat this "yellow menace" and to get his wife in line.
It's typical that in an era of women's progress (at this point, right after the 1920's and again during WWII, when women had gone to work), the conservative backlash would often employ a comparison of American women to the submissiveness of Asian women, a supposed element of Eastern cultures that seemed to be the only one they wanted to embrace. The fate of Bankhead's character is indeed to be cowed, branded on the chest with what might as well have been a Japanese scarlet letter, and it mirrors the "well-trained" comment the other man had made earlier. At least she's not ultimately doomed, as would probably be the case after the Production Code started being enforced, and her husband loves her instead of judges her, which felt at least a little nice.
Overall, the problems with the film made it hard to truly love, but I confess I found it entertaining, and was glad I saw it.
It was just one year after making The Cheat that Bankhead, frustrated with living in Hollywood and the studio trying to force her into the mold of Garbo, would leave Hollywood. As her credit list is so short, it was a joy to see her here, crooning "I'll see you in my dreams" in her sultry voice, and wearing shimmering gowns. She plays a woman who is in a good marriage, but who spends and gambles too much money while her husband (Harvey Stephens) is off trying to strike it rich through his business ventures. A lady's man who has returned from Asia (Irving Pichel) has his eye on her, thus setting up conflict. He's quite brazen in his approach, leading to this exchange:
"Are you in love with your husband?" "Yes. Isn't it too bad?" "Not necessarily."
Now it's not that she doesn't have sizzle with her husband, as at one point he caresses her face and says "I'm not your husband," and when she replies "Gracious!" he says "I'm your lover," then plants a long, lingering kiss on her.
Meanwhile, the other man smugly lets her see is "gallery of ghosts," which are figurines made of each of the women who were "kind" to him, meaning all the women he's bedded. He also tells her he brands all of his belongings with a Japanese character that means "I possess." Rather than fleeing from this creepy dude (who incidentally looks just like Mike Meyers), she asks to see more, wondering if he has a "head strung up in a closet" behind a door, when in fact when he slides the door open we see two musicians who immediately begin playing traditional Chinese instruments. He then tries to give her a beautiful, ornate gown that belonged to a "Siamese princess," the references coming fast and furious from all over Asia. As the film progresses, he continues to pursue her like a jungle cat stalking its prey, and when he overhears her having lost a fortune on an ill-advised stock gamble, pounces.
Unfortunately, in the pervasive feeling of superiority and exoticism of Asian cultures, there are certainly elements of racism. The telltale warning sign comes in the credits, with the "Chinese style" English writing announcing the cast and crew. Early on Pichel's character confides to another that "The Oriental woman isn't really a slave, she's simply been well-trained." Later he tells Bankhead's character that "Opium has never agreed with me, but some of us (in Asia) use it as you would cigarettes," echoing an aspect of the "Yellow peril" propaganda that also conveniently overlooked Britain's role in forcing opium on the Chinese people.
While touring his mansion, she takes one look at his statue of the Hindu-Buddhist deity Yama concealed behind a hidden door and says, "Oh, how dreadful." While he says "that depends on your point-of-view" and explains to her that it's their god of destruction, he of course doesn't explain any of the philosophical nuance, e.g. That it represents inevitable impermanence more than anything else, and we just get a tight shot of the god's rather sinister face. Later a group of affluent white people will put on an "Oriental" themed bazaar (following the previous year's Native American theme), where the cultures and dance are jumbled together for merriment, while the only real Asian people we see are servants.
The would-be lover may be white, but he's certainly a surrogate for Asians, having been corrupted by their ways, cruelly wanting to possess (and literally brand!) women, and being crafty and deviously unpredictable. The wife represents wayward, sinful women, those who don't know a good thing when they've got it, and whose morals may bend when necessary. The upright husband, the one who would much rather travel to Western Europe, thus does moralistic double duty, to defeat this "yellow menace" and to get his wife in line.
It's typical that in an era of women's progress (at this point, right after the 1920's and again during WWII, when women had gone to work), the conservative backlash would often employ a comparison of American women to the submissiveness of Asian women, a supposed element of Eastern cultures that seemed to be the only one they wanted to embrace. The fate of Bankhead's character is indeed to be cowed, branded on the chest with what might as well have been a Japanese scarlet letter, and it mirrors the "well-trained" comment the other man had made earlier. At least she's not ultimately doomed, as would probably be the case after the Production Code started being enforced, and her husband loves her instead of judges her, which felt at least a little nice.
Overall, the problems with the film made it hard to truly love, but I confess I found it entertaining, and was glad I saw it.
