Daughter of Shanghai

Fantastically plotted and directed to pack two hours worth of story into its 62-minute runtime, Robert Florey’s Daughter of Shanghai stars the pioneering Anna May Wong as Lan Ying Lin, a San Francisco woman searching for the human traffickers who murdered her father. From the intense airborne sequence that opens the film, the pacing never lets up: Ying Lin is shot at, kidnapped, and defrauded; she travels by taxicab, plane, and boat; she disguises herself as an exotic dancer and a young male refugee; she’s sexually assaulted, hogtied, and dangled from an aircraft over the ocean. The film is almost entirely nocturnal, cinematographer Schoenbaum’s battles between light and shadow hinting at film noir’s dominant expressionism to come, and the sleazy nightclub and dressing rooms in Port o’ Juan are filmed with an absorbing naturalism. Charles Bickford is on hand as club owner Otto Hartman, and Anthony Quinn has a small, early part as a pilot for the smugglers. The film’s most memorable presence, however, is Cecil Cunningham, who essentially plays two separate characters, one naughty and one nice, in the form of duplicitous Mrs. Hunt.