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The Curse of Quon Gwon
Sep. 8th, 2019 09:31 amIn 1916, Marion E. Wong founded her own production company, Mandarin Film Company, and wrote, directed, and acted in her first film: The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West, a seven- or eight-reel film that starred her friends and family from the Oakland, California Chinese-American community.
However, Wong couldn’t find a distributor, so the full film was only screened once, basically so the people who had worked on it could see it. Then it moldered in film canisters for decades, until a filmmaker working on a documentary about Hollywood Chinese interviewed the lead actress’s daughter, who gave him the two surviving reels, four and seven.
The surviving film is available on Youtube, but (last time I checked) without a soundtrack, which is why I didn’t watch it even though it sounded super interesting when I first read about it last year: I just couldn’t bring myself to watch 35-minutes of truly silent film when the intertitles have been lost and the reels aren’t even sequential.
So I was awfully pleased when the IU cinema showed it last week (with a soundtrack provided by a DJ!), and I am happy to report that it’s actually easier to follow than you might imagine from that description. There was apparently a story about politics in the original film - conspiracies etc? - this aspect is lost because of the fragmentary nature of the film and the lack of intertitles; but there’s also a love story, which is easy enough to follow and also rather sweet.
There’s a particularly cute moment when the hero and the heroine are dressing up for their… engagement party? Wedding?... and the hero puts on a hat that has long tassels dangling over his shoulders, and the heroine gives the tassels a little tug. Adorable!
Then we skip forward three reels. The heroine, through the machinations of the villainess (played by Marion E. Wong herself), has her baby wrenched from her arms and is tossed out of the house, and wanders henceforth on the moors like King Lear. Then the hero returns from wherever he has been! Still wearing his tasseled hat! And discovers that his baby is ill and his bride has been banished, and goes out to look for her! AND CAN’T FIND HER!
But fortunately in the meantime, she has wandered back to the house and collapsed across the doorstep in exhaustion, so when he gets home he picks her up and carries her bridal-style across the threshold. (This is some A++ silent film melodrama)
Meanwhile, the villainess confesses her evil plot (I’m assuming she accused our heroine of infidelity or something? But this is one of the subtleties that only the lost intertitles could clear up) and commits suicide. We close on a shot of the lead couple sitting on the steps with their adorable fat baby, which seems super conclusive to me, so I suspect that the film was only seven reels originally. Happy end!
However, Wong couldn’t find a distributor, so the full film was only screened once, basically so the people who had worked on it could see it. Then it moldered in film canisters for decades, until a filmmaker working on a documentary about Hollywood Chinese interviewed the lead actress’s daughter, who gave him the two surviving reels, four and seven.
The surviving film is available on Youtube, but (last time I checked) without a soundtrack, which is why I didn’t watch it even though it sounded super interesting when I first read about it last year: I just couldn’t bring myself to watch 35-minutes of truly silent film when the intertitles have been lost and the reels aren’t even sequential.
So I was awfully pleased when the IU cinema showed it last week (with a soundtrack provided by a DJ!), and I am happy to report that it’s actually easier to follow than you might imagine from that description. There was apparently a story about politics in the original film - conspiracies etc? - this aspect is lost because of the fragmentary nature of the film and the lack of intertitles; but there’s also a love story, which is easy enough to follow and also rather sweet.
There’s a particularly cute moment when the hero and the heroine are dressing up for their… engagement party? Wedding?... and the hero puts on a hat that has long tassels dangling over his shoulders, and the heroine gives the tassels a little tug. Adorable!
Then we skip forward three reels. The heroine, through the machinations of the villainess (played by Marion E. Wong herself), has her baby wrenched from her arms and is tossed out of the house, and wanders henceforth on the moors like King Lear. Then the hero returns from wherever he has been! Still wearing his tasseled hat! And discovers that his baby is ill and his bride has been banished, and goes out to look for her! AND CAN’T FIND HER!
But fortunately in the meantime, she has wandered back to the house and collapsed across the doorstep in exhaustion, so when he gets home he picks her up and carries her bridal-style across the threshold. (This is some A++ silent film melodrama)
Meanwhile, the villainess confesses her evil plot (I’m assuming she accused our heroine of infidelity or something? But this is one of the subtleties that only the lost intertitles could clear up) and commits suicide. We close on a shot of the lead couple sitting on the steps with their adorable fat baby, which seems super conclusive to me, so I suspect that the film was only seven reels originally. Happy end!
