WHITE TIGER
(Tod Browning, 1923, US, 60 and 86 minutes)
In the years after writer-director Tod Browning made Drifting with Priscilla Dean, then-lesser known costar Wallace Beery (The Champ, Treasure Island) would become the bigger star, but she carries this 1923 silent with the strength of her grounded, sympathetic presence.
If Browning's cautionary tale about the opium trade isn't as outré as later efforts, like Freaks or The Unholy Trio, the film offers its share of pleasures, especially in the George Eastman House's attractive digital restoration.
In Browning's adaptation of the play by Daisy H. Andrews and Under Capricorn's John Colton, Dean plays Cassie Cook, an American opium smuggler in Shanghai. Though she associates with prostitutes, she isn't a woman of easy leisure (to the script's credit, it doesn't suggest that sex workers are beneath contempt, only that Cassie plies a different trade).
Though she and Beery's Jules were once rivals, they join forces at the outset, though the relationship will remain prickly. When Cassie's debts get out of hand, she bets on the horses, and when she loses at the track, she trades Shanghai for Hangzhou, reinventing herself as author Lucille Preston in a bid to evade Jules who blames her for the bad racing tip. There, she and 15-year-old Rose Li (a very good Anna May Wong whose 1920s films have largely been lost) fall for Captain Jarvis (Matt Moore), an undercover agent disguised as a mining chief, but only one woman will capture his heart.
In Browning's Dean films, cute tykes often come along to wear down her defenses, and missionary's son Billy (Bruce Guerin), ably fills that role. The convoluted plot ends with a skirmish between Jules and Jarvis, a tragic death, and a fiery conflagration, but our anti-heroine and her small charge emerge unscathed.
Dean plays another gold-hearted criminal in the London-set, Dickens-inspired White Tiger, which reteams her with Browning and Beery. In the prologue, siblings Sylvia and Roy become separated through their safecracker father's involvement with Beery's shady Hawkes, who raises the girl as his daughter.
Fifteen years later, she and Hawkes, aka Donelli, have become pickpockets, while Roy (the droll Raymond Griffith), aka The Kid, serves as the human motor behind a chess-playing automaton. Though they don't recognize each other when they meet, they become friends and run off to NYC with Donelli to launch a criminal enterprise, except Sylvia becomes smitten with straight-arrow Dick Longworth (Moore) who threatens to expose their operation to separate marks from their jewels by distracting them with robotic chess.
When the heat gets too hot, they all end up at Longworth's cabin in the woods where long-buried secrets finally come to light. Though no cute tykes appear, two kittens serve a similar purpose.
This Kino Lorber release includes the sole surviving fragment of Browning's 1919 Exquisite Thief with Dean, while the illuminating commentary tracks from film historians Anthony Slide and Bret Wood offer background on the director and the unheralded actress, who would exit the business in the coming decade, and appears to have lived a long and happy life.
Though Drifting is the top-billed feature, the jewel in the crown is White Tiger, though Anna May Wong, who would soon become a more prominent actress, elevates the former with her memorably self-sacrificing turn.
Drifting/White Tiger is available on DVD and Blu-ray via Kino Lorber. Drifting images from Blu-ray.com and Film Affinity and White Tiger from Cinematary.
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