The Ides of Anna May Wong: Island of Lost Men

Note: This month we examined three Anna May Wong movies to give Perry Mason reviews a little break. I liked the overall look of this B-picture (the IA print is surprisingly nice) though some stock footage of drumming natives seemed out of place.

Island of Lost Men
1939 / 1:03
Tagline: “Madman Emperor of a Savage Jungle World beyond Civilization's Last Outpost”
[internet archive]

This picture is less about jungle melodrama and more about the pathology of power. Prin, the river despot, is a case study in the old maxim that absolute power doesn’t just corrupt – it’s both fuel and exhaust of anger, stupidity, and greed. Lost like Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Prin builds his empire on fear and poisonous bathtub gin, and then wonders why the local people want him dead. His tyranny is theatrical, his unpredictability a management style, and his contempt for flowers a neat metaphor for his oily work rag of a soul.

The film’s moral stance is clear: Prin’s corporate org chart is a hierarchy of scoundrels, each ready to sell him out for a handful of coins or a chance at survival. His insistence on precedence and obedience is laughable because the whole system is held together with narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. When your lieutenants are philosophical renegades and gin-peddling thugs, you don’t need to run ads for an enemy - they’re already on the payroll.

J. Carroll Naish plays Prin like a man auditioning for the role of “Worst Dinner Guest Alive.” His performance oscillates between greasy charm and full hambone, and when he tips into the latter, we movie-goers can only hope the director calls “cut” before the scenery collapses under the chewing. Anna May Wong, by contrast, is all watchful restraint - her silences speak louder than Prin’s tirades. Nobody does the slow burn of contempt like Wong, and here she makes it look effortless. And scalding. Wong was great and Hollywood didn’t have a clue what to do with her.

Anthony Quinn, in regrettable yellowface makeup, brings a pulse to the proceedings, and Broderick Crawford swaggers through like a young’un who knows he’s in a B-picture and intends to enjoy it. The set design is a triumph of atmosphere - Karl Struss shoots Prin’s compound with a conviction that the script only intermittently earns. Sadly, this is namby-pamby Post-Code, so when the philo professor delivers the severed head of his colleague Ernest Truex to Prin, the scene is not nearly as grisly as it should have been.

What impresses isn’t the plot but the texture: the sense of a world where gorgeous orchids bloom and little men rot, where tyranny is a performance and loyalty for suckers. It’s a jungle noir with philosophical pretensions, and if it doesn’t quite deliver on its ambitions, it still offers a pungent whiff of moral decay.

Perry Mason 110: Bethel Leslie

Note: Bethel Leslie (1929 - 1999) had a distinguished career, marked by success in theater, television, and film, and was recognized with both Emmy and Tony Award nominations. Her career, which spanned over 50 years, included numerous roles in classic TV dramas like Playhouse 90 and the greatest courtroom drama in the history of Creation, and later she worked as the head writer for the soap opera The Secret Storm. She received a Tony nomination in 1986, when she was 57, for her performance as the addict mother in Long Day's Journey into Night.

A Tribute to Bethel Leslie

Entertainers often come from families that resemble Hieronymus Bosch more than Norman Rockwell paintings, so we movie-goers, not without melancholy, wonder: what was nine-year-old Bethel Leslie thinking in 1938 when her parents split? Was acting her coping mechanism? Did joining a cast feel like joining a family - or at least a tribe of people who understood the thrill of greasepaint and applause? And were those older actors the kind of role models an upper-crust mother would want for her teenage girl? (Spoiler: probably not.) Or maybe it was simpler: acting rang a creative bell.

Whatever the psychology, history thanks producer George Abbott for spotting her. By 15, Leslie was on Broadway, in 1944, and she stayed there through the mid-Fifties, earning respect in a string of productions. She was the kind of actress who made critics reach for words like “poised” and “intelligent,” which is code for the Spockian observation “It is far easier for civilized people to act like barbarians than it is for barbarians to act like civilized people.”

On the classic Perry Mason TV series, Leslie played variations on a theme: the nice woman married to a brute who might as well wear a sign reading “Murder Me!” It’s a role that could slide into autopilot, but Leslie never mailed in being the pretty defendant. Like Raymond Burr, who could brood with the best of them, she treated the material seriously. Even when the script parked her silently at the defense table for half an episode, wedged between Della Street and Our Favorite Lawyer, Leslie radiated conviction. She understood that nuance matters - even when your only line is a rueful look.

Janet Morris in TCOT Fugitive Nurse 2/15/58
Janet insists she doesn’t want a divorce. She says it with the kind of conviction that makes you wonder if she’s lying to herself. Her husband, a doctor with a taste for cash and secrecy, has been stashing money like a squirrel in winter, neglecting to tell the IRS about his little nest egg. He’s also cheating - of course he is.

Janet, in a gesture of wounded dignity, pleads with the other woman to leave him alone. But the tax men are circling, and it’s Janet who seems to be holding the sack. Her behavior is a study in contradictions. Even Della Street, whose instincts are as sharp as a stiletto, can’t decide: Is Janet protecting the man she claims to love, or angling for the missing $92,000 - a sum that would make her a millionaire in 2026?

There’s a whiff of history here. Janet sends hubby off on a solo flight to Salt Lake City with hot coffee and a smile, then asks where he’ll be staying so Mason can reach him about the divorce. He’s startled, suspicious. So are we. Is this a bait-and-switch from a woman who once believed in happily-ever-after?

And then there’s Leslie - society to her fingertips. She opens the episode in a mink that suggests it’s all she’s wearing, like a JohnO’Hara heroine sprung to life. Janet, by contrast, wears privilege like a tired perfume. She thought life with her med student would be champagne and roses. Instead, it’s subpoenas and despair.

Evelyn Girard in TCOT Purple Woman 11/22/58
Evelyn had that Yankee polish - quiet grit, loyalty stitched into every gesture. Her father’s pulpit loomed behind her like a cathedral shadow, and she guarded his name as if it were Meissen porcelain. Yet here she was, in Perry Mason’s office, voice brittle as old glass. Her husband, an art dealer with a taste for fraud, had passed off a counterfeit canvas. Was she exposed? Mason, calm as winter light, assured her she was clean. Still, her words sagged with fatigue: “He’ll cheat whenever cheating’s possible.” Della Street caught the look - disillusion, stark and cold.

But Evelyn’s virtue had hairline cracks. She’d been writing love letters with the Chronicle’s art critic - letters her husband now clutched like a mace. When he confronted her, his cruelty was surgical. “How did he ever get a job on a newspaper?” he sneered, savoring the sting. He promised her father would read every sordid syllable in divorce court. Evelyn, trembling, threatened him with scissors - an outburst witnessed by the secretary he bedded. Later, to that same woman, he spat a line no woman should hear: “You’re too intellectual to understand my wife’s emotionality.”

And so the story turned. Evelyn in jail, eyes wide with disbelief. Mason, patient, laying out motive and opportunity like cards on green felt. She could see the picture any DA would paint for twelve folks too dumb to get out of jury duty - but still, lips sealed, she refused to name her lover. Burr gave Leslie space, as he always did for guest stars in the jail cell interview scene. The scene was a high note of drama, second only to the confession yet to come.

Sylvia Sutton in TCOT Wayward Wife 1/23/60
Sylvia was running on fumes when she swept into Perry Mason’s office, all nerves and strained poise. Her husband, Ben - a man with the soul of a loan shark - had already squeezed $14,000 out of her and now wanted ten grand more from her brother Gil. The price of silence? A car crash Gil allegedly caused, leaving a woman paralyzed and the police none the wiser. Mason, cool as a martini, advised her to skip the payoff and tell the cops everything.

But fear makes fools of us all. Convinced Gil had killed Ben, Sylvia purloined a cleaning woman’s cloth coat and babushka – Harper’s Bazaar would call that “peasant chic” - and dashed to her ransacked house, where Ben lay sprawled, skull cracked by a fireplace poker. The cleaning woman spotted the theft, and soon Sylvia was in custody, her mug shot destined for the society pages she once skimmed over breakfast.

In court, Sylvia spoke no lines, yet her face told volumes. Irony flickered in her eyes as witnesses paraded by - was this really her life? Stealing a maid’s clothes, shrieking at cabbies like a fishwife? She mourned her blindness: not seeing Ben for the cad he was from the get-go, not foreseeing the sister-in-law’s affair with Ben, not imagining the car crash that set this domino run in motion. Still, she held her head high. Yankee grit, laced with rue. Life had thrown her curveballs, and Sylvia - tragic, stylish Sylvia - was determined to look her best swinging.

Perry Mason 109: TCOT Counterfeit Eye

🚨 STOP SCROLLING, SHEEPLE! 🚨 You think Perry Mason is just courtroom drama? WRONG. It’s a coded message. Let me break it down for you: Early novels? Mason’s legal aide = Karl Jackson. Fast-forward to Season 4? Mason’s aide = law student David Gideon, played by Karl Held. Two Karls. TWO. KARLS. Coincidence? Wake up, NPCs! This isn’t random casting - it’s SUS. Gardner knew. Producer Gail Patrick Jackson knew. Burr knew. They’re signaling something BIG. Karl is the KEY. You think it’s about legal aides? LOL. No. It’s about CONTROL. It’s about the hidden network of Karls pulling strings behind the scenes. Ever heard of Karl Malone? Karl Urban? Karl Popper? Karl Marx? CONNECT THE DOTS, PEOPLE. This is a Karl Kabal. A Karlspiracy.  If you’re not asking WHY there are so many Karls, you’re already lost. Smash that like button if you’re ready to EXPOSE THE TRUTH. #Karlspiracy #WakeUpSheeple #PerryMasonDecoded

The Case of the Counterfeit Eye – Erle Stanley Gardner

This one kicks off with Perry Mason getting a client whose problem is so odd it sounds like a setup for a “what’s gross” joke from the Sixties. A man named Brunold storms in, claiming someone swiped one of his glass eyes and subbed it with a cheap counterfeit. He’s convinced the real eye will be planted at a crime scene because, obviously, in 1935 rare glass eyes are the new fingerprints.

Before Perry can finish his morning coffee, in come a young woman and her brother. The snotty brother worked for Hartley Bassett, a businessman with all the charm of a wet sock, and the kind of party pooper that demands employees caught embezzling pay it back. Bassett wants his money back yesterday, but the self-involved brother blew it. The sister begs Mason to negotiate payback on the installment plan. Mason agrees, because he thinks erring youth, even if conceited, ought not to take a fall that might wreck a life that can still be salvaged.

When Mason visits Bassett, the man is about as flexible as an old back in yoga class. No deal, no way. But as Mason heads out, Bassett’s wife corners him with a question in the mode of “Can you put a virgin in jail as a vagrant.”* To whit: is it possible to run off with another man without committing bigamy? Mason’s day is now officially one of those “one damn thing after another” days. And then Bassett turns up dead, clutching - you guessed it - a glass eye.

Sounds familiar? In the 1960 TV version of this novel, victim Bassett ended up clutching a piece of the toupee of the accused. Americans were made of sterner stuff in the 1930s compared to the 1960s, I guess. I recall in the late Seventies glass eyes were still regarded with a bit of cringe, with the reputation that they were so ill-fitting they would pop out if the wearer was jammed into a Japanese commuter train. I daresay the tech is much better now.

Like the other Mason novels of the Thirties and Forties, the energy never languishes. Gardner keeps tossing Mason into conflicts, and Mason keeps bending the law. Not yet on the Mason bus with the destination Pythagorean Fork, Della Street observes, “You do the darndest things! You’re half saint and half devil! There isn’t any middle ground  - you go to both extremes!”

The other notable point of only the sixth Mason novel (of 80) is meeting nemesis District Attorney Hamilton Burger, who’ll become a series regular. He’s introduced as Mason’s courtroom foil, but not a cartoon villain. Fairly civil at this early, Burger knows Mason’s goal is truth - even if his methods involve razzle-dazzle.

The finale? A courtroom showdown packed with flamboyance. Mason’s gambits seem reckless, but the post-game explanation makes you admire the nerve and the logic. If you want psychological depth, complex social issues, diverse and flawed characters, and blending with other genres like thrillers, look elsewhere. If you want your Thirties as tough as taxes and full of legal acrobatics, this mystery delivers.

* TCOT Vagabond Virgin

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.

Perry Mason 108: TCOT Empty Tin

Note: Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, this novel carries the echo of weekly installments, with bits of recap tucked into the dialogue like breadcrumbs for new readers. We post-modern types can skim those, but they’re part of the charm, like cigarette ads in old paperbacks.

The Case of the Empty Tin – Erle Stanley Gardner

Ah yes, that Perry Mason mystery from 1941 - now there’s a tale that takes you back. Not to the courtroom, not to the bustling lawyer’s office with its clacking typewriters and Della Street’s crisp efficiency and canny instincts, but to the Gentrie household, where the scent of canned peaches and linoleum wax hangs in the air like a “female Rockwell” Frances Tipton Hunter illustration come to life.

The Gentries - salt-of-the-earth folks - run a modest hardware store, the kind with creaky floorboards and bins of nails that smell faintly of sawdust. Every penny counts, so they take in a roomer, a quiet soul who pays his rent on time and doesn’t make demands. They preserve fruits in Mason jars, not for the foreshadowing, mind you, but because it’s cheaper. There’s a spinster sister who knows her way around a pressure cooker, and a hired woman who can whip up a meatloaf that could win prizes at the county fair. Three kids tumble through the house like marbles on a hardwood floor, and though the seams of the family fabric are stretched, they hold.

Now, some Mason fans - those who like their mysteries served hot with a side of courtroom drama and a dash of the old ultra-violence - might find this beginning a tad slow. But for those of us who’ve read a couple dozen of Gardner’s works and know the rhythm of his prose like the back of a well-worn paperback, this domestic start is a breath of fresh air. It’s Hitchcockian, really - the suspense nestled in the folds of the everyday, the mystery blooming in the garden of the mundane.

And Perry? He’s in rare form. He double-talks the cops with the ease of a man ordering coffee. He breaks into houses like he’s checking the mail. He speeds through traffic with Della riding shotgun, her hair tousled and her wits sharp. She’s no mere secretary here - she’s a co-conspirator, a thinker, a woman who knows things men don’t, and isn’t afraid to say so.

And no courtroom scene? Some hardcore readers might pout, others might cheer. But me? I say this one’s a gem. If you’re a Mason fan, make it your next read.

The Kalends of Anna May Wong: Shanghai Express

Note: To take a break from Perry Mason, this Happy New Year season we look over a couple of movies with Anna May Wong. In this one, Wong, a woman named Hui Fei, shares a train compartment with fellow fancy woman Marlene Dietrich. The keeper of a Shanghai boarding house Mrs. Haggarty (Louise Closer Hale), remarks pointedly to Hui Fei “I’m sure you’re very respectable, madam?” Hui Fei answers, “I must confess I don’t know the standard of respectability that you demand in your boarding house, Mrs. Haggarty.” Nor, implies her tone as remote as Mount Tai, does she care.

Shanghai Express
1932 / 1:22
Tagline: “Grand Hotel on a Train”
[internet archive]

A surreal dream with train whistles – could a movie-goer like me who grew up three blocks from a train yard want anything more nostalgic? Director Josef Sternberg doesn’t care about plot or character - he’s chasing atmosphere like an artist who wants us knuckle-walkers to see the ultimate, intrinsic nature of reality as it truly is, beyond our judgments, concepts, or stories. Smoke, shadows, banners of Chinese characters, silhouettes that look carved out of fog. It’s all about the images beautiful dreamers half-remember after waking: aisleways, windows, shades sliding up and down, a machine gun spitting fire from a train carriage.

For buffs, there’s plenty to chew on. Train fetishists will swoon over the haunting shots of locomotives and carriages, while we tourists get a front-row seat to Peiping and Shanghai crowds, filmed with Sternberg’s obsessive eye for movement and texture. It’s a world where train wagons graze storefronts and humanity swirls in clouds of steam. Sternberg loved crowds.

Pre-Code fans will grin. Marlene Dietrich smolders as Shanghai Lily, a woman who ruins men out of sheer laziness, while Anna May Wong turns smoking into a sacrament. Their scenes together make tobacco look like the most sensual pastime on earth. Wong’s Hui Fei is pure steel - her “I’m Unbeatable Even if You Beat Me” look could stop a runaway train. When she murders a man and pockets twenty grand, the movie barely blinks. Moral ambiguity was never so hip.

Critics carp about thin characterization, but that’s missing the point. Sternberg isn’t telling a story; he’s staging a dream. The characters are pawns of chance, drifting through a world where everyone – those who wear pants included - is vulnerable. Dietrich’s praying hands, Wong’s icy poise, Eugene Pallette’s racist buffoonery - they’re fragments in a cinematic collage. Transience – soon it’s all dust, we’re all dust – the movie-goer can tell Sternberg read his Marcus Aurelius closely.

The film’s hostility toward missionaries and moralists is deliciously Pre-Code. The English surgeon gets scolded for being a “materialist,” which was morse for “atheist” back then. Meanwhile, the gamblers and fallen women seem more alive than the pious crowd.

In the end, it’s not about who gets the girl or whether the revolutionaries succeed. It’s about the look and feel: smoke curling like a question mark, shadows creeping like rumors, and two women who make convention look like something only squares worry about.

European Reading Challenge #12

Etruscan Places – D.H. Lawrence

The author of Twilight in Italy journeyed through Etruria in April 1927, though the resulting narrative - delayed by illness, distraction, and death - emerged only in 1932. The prose flows with the practiced ease of a seasoned novelist, yet beneath its surface lies a curious tension: admiration and disdain, insight and prejudice, often in the same breath. He calls peasants “rats,” yet lingers over their gestures with affection.

The book is part travelogue, part art history, and part metaphysical speculation. Lawrence’s worldview resists tidy classification. He is not rationalist, certainly not empiricist. Rather, he sees the world as alive, animated by forces older than logic. His soul, he suggests, is a spark - divine, transient - carried briefly in a mortal husk before returning to the cosmic fire. It is a vision both Stoic and poetic, and not without appeal to those of us hardcore readers weary of mechanistic modernity and algorithmic post-modernism.

Like Elliot Paul, Lawrence captures a Europe that now feels impossibly distant. The interwar years - so close to catastrophe, yet oddly serene - evoke a nostalgia for a world we post-moderns never knew. A time before carbon guilt for every jet boarding, before the commodification of every village square.

His fascination with the Etruscans is infectious, though not entirely objective. He dislikes the Romans, seeing in them the cold engineers of empire. The Etruscans, by contrast, are sensual, mysterious, and conveniently unknowable. Lawrence, having read a few books, writes as if he knows more than most. He probably does - but not more than the scholars he dismisses. Still, his confidence is charming, reminiscent of a young Robert Byron waving away academic consensus with a flourishes of bombast and wit.

In the end, it is not the accuracy of Lawrence’s claims that matters, but the vitality of his vision. He writes not to inform, but to awaken.