Robert Florey was a prolific director of excellent B-films in the thirties and forties -- of which Daughter of Shanghai is a good example -- before moving to television in the fifties. Daughter of Shanghai runs sixty-five minutes and is a brisk and complex film that has Anna May Wong tracking down a group of human traffickers who killed her father. She is aided by a federal officer, played by Korean Phillip Ahn. Wong moves quickly from San Francisco to the Caribbean, where she finds Charles Bickford running the operation, with the help of J, Carrol Nash and Anthony Quinn. She is not really a "daughter of Shanghai" but takes that title in order to get a job dancing in Bickford's sleazy cafe from which he runs the smuggling of Chinese into the United States. The plot moves at a fast pace that keeps one from noticing the holes in it, as Ahn and Wong are kidnapped by the traffickers and brought back to San Francisco, where they discover that Cecil Cunningham, a regular buyer at Wong's father's import business, is the real boss of the organization.
Daughter of Shanghai is a title similar to 1931's Daughter of the Dragon (1931), where Wong played the daughter of Fu Manchu and which I posted about earlier this month. Wong fought long and hard during her career to avoid the role of the exotic Asian, with some limited success, and the irony of Florey's film is that she only played that role briefly, as a dancer, in order expose human trafficking; at one point she even impersonates a man in order to be included among smuggled Chinese.
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