Fri 5 Jun 2015
Reviewed by Dan Stumpf: LIMEHOUSE BLUES (1934).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[10] Comments
LIMEHOUSE BLUES. Paramount, 1934. Re-released as East End Chant. George Raft, Anna May Wong, Jean Parker, Kent Taylor, Montagu Love, Billy Bevan, Eric Blore and (don’t blink or you’ll miss her) Ann Sheridan. Written by Cyril Hume and a bunch of others, including Philip MacDonald. Directed by Alexander Hall.
Sheer unmitigated bosh, done up in the lavish Paramount style, and a lot of fun, though you may not respect yourself in the morning.
George Raft stars as a Chinese-American gangster (!?) transplanted to London , where he and Anna May Wong run Paramount’s version of a Waterfront Dive, filled with fog, smoke, and smoggy folk, with musical numbers to rival a Cher concert.
But this tawdry pleasure dome is just a cover for his smuggling activities, which have roused the ire of the constabulary and a loutish rival (Montagu Love) with a cute guttersnipe step-daughter (Jean Parker.) When George saves her from the law she returns the favor, and when he murders her step-father (unbeknownst to her) he offers her a job in his club and starts making her over into his ideal English gentlewoman.
All is not My Fair Lady, however; it ain’t even Vertigo. This Galatea has no love for her Pygmalion (The writers hint that the White Woman in her naturally recoils from the racially-mixed Raft.) but Anna May Wong is murderously jealous of their non-relationship. When Jean meets Kent Taylor (in a scene that just about defines “meeting cute†— they’re caught in a puppy stampede) and falls for him, George gets lethally jealous himself. And the law is closing in on just about everybody.
I should warn potential viewers that the ending is a sappy, badly-motivated thing that will please no one, and there’s plenty of subtle racism about the place, but this is done with that elegant Paramount polish, the look that took Lubitsch and Von Sternberg to the heights, and it’s awfully easy to watch. George Raft’s constipated thesping could almost be mistaken for Oriental inscrutability, and it’s just too bad he’s paired off with Anna May Wong’s genuine article — those wonderfully expressive eyes in her beautiful mask-like face show him up rather badly.
The rest of the cast is typical Hollywood perfection, though: a regiment of solid supporting players effortlessly underpinning a movie that can’t be taken seriously but rewards an indulgent critical wink.
June 5th, 2015 at 9:59 pm
Add a pencil thin mustache, and George could be Leslie Charteris.
Thanks to Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer, Limehouse will always be the notorious den of opium, prostitution, tongs, and the Yellow Peril, foggy and mysterious, and in the imagination stuck somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu.
Edward G. Robinson made a much more believable Chinese hatchet man.
June 5th, 2015 at 10:08 pm
It’s been a long time since I read anything by Thomas Burke, over 50 years perhaps, but it was he I thought of too, as soon as Dan sent me this review to post.
June 5th, 2015 at 10:14 pm
While it is certainly all right to not like an actor’s work, when he is George Raft and had a run of thirty years, he had to be doing something right. So, careful now. He was for a while an enormous star, and on the way down quite effective in things like Rogue Cop and his television series, I Am The Law. At the very least, other than moving well, he had empathy, and without that quality, nothing else exists on screen.
June 5th, 2015 at 11:06 pm
Kent Smith is not Kent Taylor. Or, vice versa.
June 5th, 2015 at 11:36 pm
Kent Taylor it is, in both places now. Thanks for catching that, Barry.
June 6th, 2015 at 6:20 am
Barry, I like George Raft myself, particularly in NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, MANPOWER and THE GLASS KEY, but I still maintain he was never a terribly expressive actor, and my opinion of his acting as “constipated” remains.
June 6th, 2015 at 3:33 pm
Here’s the first paragraph from the review in the NEW YORK TIMES:
“The icy-eyed George Raft, whose Tenderloin manner was so authentic that he became one of the most fascinating type actors of the gangster period, continues to be frustrated in his efforts to find a wider scope for his talents. A few months ago Mr. Raft was pretending to be a matador of old Mejico, an effort in which he was hindered by his inability to suppress an inescapable Tenth Avenue manner. In the clutching-hand melodrama “Limehouse Blues” at the Rialto, he has equal difficulty in persuading us that he is a gallant half-breed Chinaman who is the great scourge of Scotland Yard and the emir of Limehouse. Even when Mr. Raft dons the ceremonial robes, burns incense and prays to the Buddha of his fathers, he suffers from an unhappy habit of pronouncing his words like the dance-hall vaqueros of lower Broadway.”
To read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F0DE1D7133FE53ABC4A52DFB467838F629EDE
June 6th, 2015 at 4:16 pm
If by the above it means he could not play a Chinese man, fine. Neither could anyone else. The madness of Paramount.
June 6th, 2015 at 10:30 pm
Barry,
Within the limits of what he did Raft was damn good. He is an attractive lead in several films and always reliable as a support. He did a number of good films in the fifties and into the early sixties, and while it was no great acting role he sent himself up gallantly in Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT.
I agree that not being good as Chinese is hardly a knock, John Wayne wasn’t a particularly convincing Mongol and neither was William Conrad or Agnes Moorehead. Even Chris Lee wasn’t overly convincing as Chinese in TERROR OF THE TONGS or as Fu Manchu though I enjoyed the films.
At least Raft wasn’t required to be a dancing Chinese.
Steve,
I’ve read Burke more recently, but it was “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” and not LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS.
June 10th, 2015 at 9:21 am
And these days, when I think of Limehouse, I’m as likely to think of the Breeders’ song as the more…notalgic?…”Limehouse /Blues.” Of course, there were actors at hand who could play Chinese Americans, such as Wong and Keye Luke, but that Would Be Wrong, or something, even as Emma Stone fails to convince where MAD MAX’s Courtney Eaton or her sisters would work rather well. And, of course, Wong’s career suffered as a result…so much so that a group of documentarians thought that Jack Soo had been the first Asian-American to star in in a US network tv series (his 1960s VALENTINE’S DAY, with Tony Fraciosa as the lead)…until I pointed out Wong’s detective drama on DuMont. (Hell, Lani Miyazaki as Toki in MR. BROADWAY was on at the same time as the Soo series…leaving aside even more stereotypical roles such as those in the likes of HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL.)