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116 6 Brian Taves Joseph H. Lewis, Anna May Wong, and Bombs over Burma When Joseph H. Lewis received the task of writing and directing Bombs over Burma in early 1942, his work was influenced by several factors above and beyond simply the setting of World War II. First, there was a whole tradition of movies over the previous decade depicting conditions in China, both as impacted by paramilitary groups and in terms of the life of the people. Second, the star of Bombs over Burma, Anna May Wong, had been the preeminent Asian American performer for two decades. Despite the history of films set in China and Wong’s previous roles, Lewis’s directorial sensibility intervened to create a film that is distinct from others. The fact that this is Lewis’s only screenplay credit makes his narrative interventions in Wong’s persona and existing patterns of Chinese settings all the more important. During the 1930s, the inevitable topicality of the strife in China spawned a whole cycle of movies. The land was depicted as ravaged by unrest that affected men and women of many races, offering only slight reasons for hope. On occasion, a melodrama such as The Good Earth (1937) attempted to delineate the Chinese people, and other films looked at missionary work (particularly after the Communist takeover). These went beyond the typical colonial genre of the white character trying to adjust to life in the East, such as in The Painted Veil (1934), to concentrate on Chinese bandits (including Barricade [1939]). The most frequently seen cinematic stock figure in these films was the Chinese warlord, invariably enacted by Caucasian actors in yellowface. Warlords ranged from the menacing (Warner Oland in Shanghai Express [1932], Akim Tamiroff in The General Died at Dawn [1936], Boris Karloff Bombs over Burma 117 in West of Shanghai [1937]) to the romanticized (Nils Asther in The Bitter Tea of General Yen [1932]). At least once, too, the warlord role was transformed into a renegade Russian, enacted by C. Henry Gordon in Roar of the Dragon (1932). While China’s Nationalist government could not help but be displeased by the unflattering representation of conditions and did all it could to discourage such movies, the fact remained that this background appeared regularly in both B and A films. With the coming of World War II, certain plot elements of films set in China shifted, while others were unchanging. Throughout the 1930s the Chinese peasant, whether in the foreground (The Good Earth) or background (the warlord cycle), was heroic and sympathetically treated. With the coming of war, this remained constant, although the figure of the missionary as outside beneficiary tended to be replaced by the American helping in the struggle for freedom. The warlord himself, the bane of his people, was replaced by the Japanese army of occupation. Apparently the first major studio release, at the beginning of February 1938, using the Sino-Japanese conflict as a major portion of the background was International Settlement. While initially based on a 1936 novel, Twentieth Century Fox altered International Settlement to focus on a reporter caught in the midst of the hostilities; the film became an espionage tale of a soldier of fortune (George Sanders) running munitions with a strong romantic subplot. The studio was determined to avoid explicitly dealing with the “controversy” between China and Japan, despite an opening montage by Lowell Thomas to add verisimilitude and the narrative twice depicting the bombing of Peiping (as Beijing was known at the time). The only Asian player billed was Keye Luke as a Chinese physician in a supporting role. Overt sympathy for the Chinese against the Japanese was first in evidence in North of Shanghai, released in February 1939. The working title was Life Is Cheap, apt for a plot wherein the Chinese characters lose their lives in a morass of betrayal and enemy action. Keye Luke as a newsreel cameraman is tempted to enter battle when he sees the fate of his countrymen and is eventually killed when investigating the murder of a missionary sympathetic to the Chinese cause. Another half dozen Asian actors had featured roles in this Columbia B. North of Shanghai retained its primacy in cinematic treatments of the conflict even as the real fighting escalated. Several films made in 1941 centered on the Burma Road. First was Universal’s Burma Convoy, released in October 1941. While involving spies around Lashio, Burma Convoy curiously manages to avoid mentioning the Japanese. The Metro-GoldwynMayer...

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