MOVIE OF THE DAY: "DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON" (1931)

Fu Man Chu is in a bit of a Chinese pickle. Convinced that a certain army officer named Petrie murdered Mrs. Fu Man Chu and their child decades earlier, he's made it his mission to enact revenge. After killing the offending Petrie and his son, Fu has returned 20 years later to kill the two remaining Petrie males. C'mon, Fu, take the song's advice and let it go!

But Fu only gets to the third generation Petrie before being shot himself by a police detective. With his remaining strength, Fu bequeaths the honor of killing Petrie #4 to his only child, Ling Moy, despite that she's -- eeww! -- his daughter! Sons, you see, are generally the only ones considered talented enough to do anything more complicated than pouring a cup of Jasmine tea. So not only is this nepotism, it's bad nepotism. In other words, Ming Loy is the Jared Kushner of the Fu house.

Half an hour later, and he's
hungry for her again.

Conveniently enough, Ling Moy lives next door to Petrie, and quickly turns on her charm. Petrie is soon following Ling Moy like a food delivery guy looking for a tip. Petrie's girlfriend Joan -- not accidentally Occidental -- sees the logogram on the wall, but can do nothing to stop his philandering ways. Maybe if she dyed her hair black and wore tight dresses.

Petrie's not the only one gaga-gai pan for Ling Moy. Chinese detective Ah Key also falls under her spell, to the point where he leaves his post guarding Ronald Petrie at her request -- not to engage in a little Eastern fun like he hoped, but so that Petrie can be kidnapped by her cronies. Like I always say -- dames, you can't trust them. Even Chinese ones.

It was fun while it lasted, eh, Petrie?

Before you can say "Peking duck", Ah Key is trussed up like a badly-wrapped mummy in an attic while Petrie and Joan are tied to chairs side by side awaiting their fate. Like her old man, Ling Moy turns up her nose at guns, preferring to kill her enemies in the most painful, ugly ways possible -- in Joan's case, getting fed an IV drip of carbolic acid. Why didn't Jack Kevorkian think of that?

But just to show she's got a heart, Ling Moy offers to turn off the drip... and force Petrie to stab Joan through the heart instead. As Jack Benny once said, I'm thinking it over!

Ah Key manages to throw himself out of the attic in order to get the attention of some cops, who raid the house. Ling Moy and her sidekick Lu Chung escape through a secret passage that leads to Petrie's house, where Ah Key is waiting. Two gunshots later, Ling and Lu are dead, while Ah Key dies at her side, promising to meet on the other side, where, presumably, they won't try to kill each other again.

Lu Chung, Fu Man Chu, and Ling Moy
surrender to Hollywood's racist demands.

Daughter of the Dragon pulls out almost all the old Hollywood tropes regarding Chinese people -- mysterious, exotic, heathen -- and, in the case of Ling Moy, slinky. The only thing missing are the opium dens. And if you happen to find one, let me know.

Other Hollywood clichés abound. The Chinese woman enticing the white sap. The Chinese cop happy to give his life for the white guy. Secret passageways built between houses without anyone noticing. A contractor like that would have his own series on HGTV.

Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakwa
look for a way to cut their scenes from
Daughter of the Dragon.

And then, of course, there's the cast. Of the four major Chinese characters, only Anna May Wong was really Chinese. The rest were Swedish (Warner Oland as Fu Man Chu), Japanese (Sessue Hayakawa as Ah Key) and American (E. Alyn Warren as Lu Chung). In old Hollywood, an inclusion rider was the guy who rode shotgun on stagecoaches in Westerns.

In fact, Oland went on to play Charlie Chan, while Warren made a specialty of Chinese flunkies who were humble on the outside, nasty on the inside. You can call it racist all you want, but movies like Daughter of the Dragon are all the more entertaining for it. It's a combination of the absurdity with the fantastical that make some of these things even watchable.

It's probably why Miramax cancelled its much ballyhooed "reimagining" of soft-spoken Charlie Chan as action hero Charles Chan circa 1993. If only that had been the only idea of Harvey Weinstein's that didn't pan out.

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