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Arguably the last totally terrific MGM musical, this 1960 adaptation of the Broadway hit preserves Judy Holliday's signature role as Ella the switchboard operator, who has all the answers for her callers but none for her lonely self. A nonpareil comedienne and prime show-tune belter, Holliday teams with Dean Martin in a delight that was her triumph and her elegy. She died at 43, of breast cancer...
...become an immortal diva, it wasn't mandatory to die young, but it couldn't hurt. Jean Harlow succumbed to kidney disease at 26, after starring for Þve years as MGM's cheekiest blond. In this 1933 ensemble comedy, Harlow, billed fourth, steals the show as Wallace Beery's conniving wife. An affront to the society swells she meets, she was catnip to amass audience who saw her as their stand-in, with a sailor's mouth and a heart of the purest brass...
...begin--good guys on one side, bad guys on the other. They advance and clash, executing kung-furious feats of acrobatic derring-do. It's like a Hong Kong action film, but every take has to be perfect. It's being done live, in a theater at Las Vegas' MGM Grand, so any misstep could injure a performer and kill the flow of the drama. Moreover, the battlefield is a large platform that has been tilted 80°, a nearly vertical position. That gives the audience a unique, God's-eye view of the action, but it's hell...
...Lewin and MGM were unlikely to hire any Chinese-Americans for major roles. "In his reports on ... other Chinese actors," Hodges writes, "Lewin consistently argued that, despite their ethnicity, they did not fit his conception of what Chinese people looked like." What were they supposed to look like? Warner Oland? No, not a Dane like Oland - Austrians! Paul Muni played Wang, Luise Rainer was O-lan and Tilly Losch got the role of Lotus. Wong, Chan, speculates, was "Too beautiful for one part and too old for the other." (Anna May's younger sister Mary Liu Heung Wong...
...Resistance to Wong came from outside the studio as well as inside. The Chinese government's official advisor to MGM, who said that her odor in China was "very bad ... whenever she appears in a movie, the newspapers print her picture with the caption 'Anna May again loses face for China.'" He wasn't exaggerating. When Shanghai Express played in the city it supposedly was set in, a local newspaper called Wong "the female traitor to China," and a journal in Tianjin carried the headline: "Paramount Uses Anna May Wong to Embarrass China Again." Apparently not realizing that the villain...