Taken from my Obit Patrol site, this brief career sketch brings up a varied number of good films.
Distinctive director of films such as Alfie (1966) and Educating Rita -- via the Hollywood Reporter. He was the son of music hall performers, who -- seriously -- used to stash him in the luggage rack of the train to avoid paying his fare. He got his start as a child actor in 1934. As a filmmaker, he began as an assistant to Hitchcock on Jamaica Inn (1939). He will never be deemed a "great director," as his batting average is too low. However, he was very good at genre films (Sink the Bismarck!, 1960; Damn the Defiant!, 1962).
He was adept at stage adaptations, winning greatest acclaim for two such films -- Alfie (1966), Michael Caine's breakout picture, as well as Educating Rita (1983), which revived Caine's critical status, and made Julie Walters' career as well. He could work magic with impossibly large set pieces. He did one of my favorite Bond films, You Only Live Twice (1967) -- and he did both the best and the worst Roger Moore Bonds -- The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) followed immediately by the awful Moonraker (1979). He scored one last time with one more stage adaptations, the lovely Shirley Valentine, featuring a great performance by Pauline Collins.
One of my first impressions of the power of film was the night we moved to Denver in 1967, when we parked across from the Wadsworth Drive-In and I saw, soundless, You Only Live Twice on an enormous screen freestanding in the dark. I was impressed. Lewis Gilbert was versatile and capable. I really did enjoy his work.
Sink the Bismarck! carries the seeming imprimatur of Edward R. Murrow, features an interoffice romance, contains toy battleships, and of course includes Kenneth More and Michael Hordern.
Broadsides! Floggings! Press gangs! With Alec Guinness, a young Dirk Bogarde, and Anthony Quayle "as the leader of the MUTINY!"
Violet Wong as the heroine of 'The Curse of Quon Gwon.'
The Curse of Quon
Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West
Dir: Marion E. Wong
Prod: Marion E. Wong
Scr: Marion E. Wong
Phot: unknown
Premiere: unreleased
(Filmed in 1916)
36:37 mins of footage
remaining
Marion Wong is the first Chinese-American filmmaker, and one
of the few silent-era female directors. What’s more remarkable, she accomplished
this is near-complete isolation in San Francisco, before World War I. This was
a period when only Essanay Studios had a primitive film-production site there.
Her incredible ability to make an effective film out of nothing went unrecognized
until 2004. That’s when filmmaker Arthur Dong found the remnants of the
completed film (only reels 4 and 7 remain) in the possession of Wong’s
descendants, and he had it restored.
This is not an example of some kind of effort that can only
be praised for its academic or anthropological interest. The filming conditions
are crude; the sets are obviously open to the light and breeze. But The Curse of Quon Gwon is watchable, clear,
and controlled. The director pans, cuts in for close-ups, irises out of scenes
— all the vocabulary of filmmaking at the time is there. One particular outdoor sequence shot at sunset, is hauntingly beautiful. It makes you wonder
what else Wong might have accomplished if her film’s fate hadn’t been so
unfortunate.
It’s a drama about heritage and assimilation, couched in
terms of the supernatural. The film’s heroine, (Violet Wong, Marion’s
sister-in-law) is a Westernized woman who marries into a very traditional
Chinese family. Their displeasure with her seeming indifference to confirming
to Old World ways. Director Wong plays the evil mother-in-law, who at one point
takes the heroine’s newborn from her and flings a knife at her feet, evidently promoting
suicide as the only way for her to conform to the family’s needs. (A small ceramic
deity appears to be the vehicle through which the curse is perpetrated.)
The meticulous attention to rituals, dress, and culture is
an invaluable insight to the state of Chinese-American culture at the time.
Like every other immigrant subculture, its generations followed a pattern: the
awkward and outmoded pioneers, usually stuck in their native language; the eager-to-assimilate
second generation, and the third, which turns back and finds sympathy with and
interest in the culture left behind for America. Wong’s movie seems to be a
melodrama with a happy ending. The god is appeased and the family is reunited.
The last images are of the couple and their child, now older. All are in
Western dress, sitting on their front stoop, happy. The bottom edge of an
American flag dangles down from the upper right-hand corner.
So what happened? Wong couldn’t get a distributor to pick up
the film, plain and simple. Without that shot at life, it wound up in film reel
canisters in Wong’s basement for decades, decaying and losing elements. Thanks
to some adroit detective work, this remarkable effort can be acknowledge if not
enjoyed as its creator intended.
The NFR Project is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry,
in chronological order. Next time: Where Are My Children?
