The Nones of Anna May Wong: Dangerous to Know

Note: Happy Belated Birthday (1/3/1905) to Anna May Wong. She was about perfect in the stylish Shanghai Express but as the moral center she’s very good in this one too. As for Akim Tamiroff's gangster, quirky villains can be memorable and engaging, especially in Thirties crime movies where generic bad guys and dumbo coppers are the norm. Gail Patrick pops up in this one – society to her fingertips, as usual, like her most famous part as Cordelia in My Man Godfrey.

Dangerous to Know
1938 / 1:10
Tagline: “No woman ever survived his love!”
[internet archive]

This one isn’t about gangsters so much as it is about the delusion that money can buy class. Steve Recka is a Prohibition relic who thinks a bankroll and a pipe organ will get him into the silk-hat set. He’s wrong, of course, but watching him try is half the fun. His notion of refinement is like a guy who thinks being soft-spoken will make his death threats sound cultured. Spoiler: they don’t.

The movie’s moral compass is Anna May Wong, and thank heaven for her. She’s the only character with a functioning ethical sense, and even the cops - who treat defenestration like a joke - call her “Empress” out of grudging respect. Wong plays it with poise and restraint, her close-ups radiating intelligence in a room full of men who think “class” means pushing people out of windows. Even to a fashion ignoramus like me, her gowns are jaw-dropping, too - silk that looks like it cost more than Recka’s soul.

Akim Tamiroff is fascinating because his eyes, like Raymond Burr’s, do all the heavy lifting. He plays Recka as a man who believes he can keep his violent instincts intact and just add polish - too bad a hood in a tuxedo still looks grubby and ridiculous. His ambition to marry into old money (Gail Patrick) is pathetic and oddly poignant - he wants the trappings of culture without the substance, and Wong knows it’s a pipe dream. Rich people, she reminds us by implication, are just as petty and venal as the rest of us, only better dressed.

The cops? Utterly amoral. They joke about suicides, frame innocents, and call it a day’s work. The film’s hostility toward law enforcement is bracing, as a cussed attitude that slipped past the Hays Office. But don’t get your hopes up - the ending is pure Hollywood slush: the rich get richer, the gangster gets his comeuppance, and the moral center pays the price.

Director Robert Florey, a noir pioneer, gives us some elegant touches - shadows creeping across doors, subjective camera shots that make you complicit in murder - but never lets the visuals upstage the story. And what a story: a cautionary tale about status hunger, told with enough Thirties bitterness to sting.