DRIFTING (1923)

We are in Shanghai which is, we are told, "gateway to the land of the lotus and the poppy—the secret of the East which attracts white men like the yellow flame of a lamp attracts moths." Meeting at the Café de Paris, where anything can be bought and sold, are Cassie and Jules, rival opium dealers who have been forced to team up in hard times. The cops are on Cassie's trail and on top of that, because a big shipment of opium has been delayed, she owes people money, so she sells a bunch of new dresses she'd recently bought to some of Madame Polly Voo's "cabaret girls" (i.e., hookers). Another reason Molly is desperate for the opium is that she hopes to raise enough money from it to send her friend Molly, a barely-functioning addict, back to the United States. Hoping to accompany her, Cassie decides to make this her one last sale, and so goes off to Hangchow, a village near the poppy fields, to find out what’s going on. What's going on is that an American named Jarvis has arrived, ostensibly in charge of re-opening some mines, but actually he's an undercover agent trying to bust the opium ring. Cassie pretends to be a visiting novelist researching a book, and as she investigates, local girl Rose Li (whose father is running the dope enterprise), who has fallen in love with Jarvis, sees Cassie nosing around suspiciously. Cassie herself begins to feel warmly about Jarvis. There's also a potential native uprising brewing. When Jules shows up to see what Cassie has learned, all the elements are in place for an explosive climax.

There are two reasons this exotic silent melodrama still retains some interest among movie buffs: it's directed by Tod Browning (FREAKS and the Lugosi DRACULA) and it features Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong in the supporting role of Rose Li. Though I think excavating Wong's films is important cultural work, I have never been terribly impressed by her acting—she always seems stiff and unconvincing (except when she was paired with Marlene Dietrich in SHANGHAI EXPRESS). She's the same here, though her role is fairly limited. Priscilla Dean, a very prolific silent actor who quit the business not long after the advent of sound, is very good as Cassie, though Matt Moore makes for a rather weak hero as Jarvis. Jules is played by a relatively young (just under 40) Wallace Beery, who almost looks handsome, though he limits himself to two expressions: disinterested and irritated. The climax, involving a village on fire and a cavalry rescue, is quite exciting. The drug-addled character of Molly disappears from the movie by the halfway point, and her relationship with Cassie is never explained. The audio commentary on the Blu-ray by Anthony Slide is poor—I guess to get hired as a commentator today, all you have to do is be able to skim IMDb for information. I could have shed as much light on this movie after one viewing as Slide did. I appreciate that smaller companies like Kino Lorber are still including these extras, but they need to up their game to keep people like me buying their products. Pictured are Dean and Beery. [Blu-ray]