Tod Browning | Drifting / 1923

the woman in her bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tod Browning and A. P. Younger (screenplay, based on the play by John Colton), Tod Browning (director) Drifting / 1923

 

I have come to realize that often audiences of silent films—and this includes reviewers and commentators—because of the lack of verbal stimulus, ignore the subtle emotions and even the intertitles as they look instead to broad and dynamic actions. So it seems with Tod Browning’s odd film of 1923, Drifting, a film which itself, on occasion, seems to drift through its scenes a bit as on an opium dream, shifting with various situations and locales as the film moves from Shanghai in the 1920s China to a provincial town Hang Chow, which lies at the heart of the poppy growing region, serving as the conduit for opium to the rest of the country and the world.

     When the central figures of the story, Cassie Cook (Priscilla Dean) and Jules Repin (Wallace Beery) move from Shanghai to Hang Chow, the film begins to come visually and physically alive, so that it is little wonder that most responses to the film are centered upon these rather remarkable scenes.

      But it is important that we first establish what has proceeded it in order to understand character motivation. Primarily, we must recognize the actor of this work, Priscilla Dean, is here established by director Tod Browning as a type of character—obviously influenced by Italian director Mario Roncoroni’s Filibus—who like Roncoroni’s heroine as an immensely strong, self-supporting female. Transformed through various roles such as a jewel thief in The Exquisite Thief (1919) (of which we have only a small segment remaining), a duo of women, one the black-hearted “Black Mike” and a benevolent Asian Ah Wing in Outside the Law (1921), and a harem prostitute for the French Foreign Legion in Under Two Flags (1922) she became a simulacrum of an evil but all-powerful woman by the end of this 1923 film, who, even if potentially converted, holds her power only through her lawless behavior—a figure whom her audiences loved simply because of the gender reversal. She was the sexually potent Bonnie to actors such as Wallace Berry’s and Lon Chaney’s impotent Clyde. 

      In Drifting she plays what most commentators simply describe as a despicable seller of opium; but the intertitles make it clear that, despite her present situation in which she has been forced through unknown circumstances to join forces with another far less reputable rival opium dealer, Repin, she is known throughout Shanghai as The Poppy Princess, the dastardliest of all opium sellers. In other words, her power, before the current unpleasant situation, was immense, felt throughout the region and perhaps even abroad. She is evil incarnate, a sobriquet important if one is to understand her various different actions throughout the film.

       At the moment she and her temporary “partner” sit in the Parisian Café (obviously in the French quarter of the internationally divided city) arguing among themselves since a large purchase of opium from the local head of the trade, Dr. Li, has failed to arrive despite their payment for it. She has in the interim purchased a closet of new dresses which remain unpaid for, the police after her for the meaningless act of nonpayment—although they may also be on to her and Repin for their more serious criminal acts since it appears that the new white man who has arrived in Hang Chow to reopen a closed mine, may in fact be a government informer. He may also be the cause of the non-delivery of goods, and Repin faults her for not taking a trip to Hang Chow to check up on the situation before making the purchase.

       Angry for the accusation and for the situation, Cassie retreats to her Café room where she has evidently lived for a long period of time. In her room, she is still furious, tossing off her hat in that fury and expressing her inner anger until she glimpses a girl laying in her bed. I have yet to find a critic who demonstrates any amazement at that situation, since the discovery of the girl does not at all seem to surprise the angry Cassie but rather calms her and then worries her, as the intertitle crucially tells us not only the name of the girl, Molly Norton (Edna Tichenor), but much about Cassie’s feelings toward her:

 

      With this one intertitle we learn nearly everything about Molly and Cassie’s relationship, that Molly is from the US and that Cassie’s heart is moved by this woman, whom we soon discover has been given a large bong of opium by someone other than the “Poppy Princess,” Cassie asking (via another intertitle) “Who got you the opium? China has caught you in its grip—but it musn’t destroy you.” She sits beside on the bed looking lovingly down upon the girl for a long while, this from a woman who later in the film cannot even bear to deal with a terrified child clinging to her neck for protection from attackers, as she attempts to push the boy away from her, obviously without even a speck of maternal feeling in her body.*

      Most commentators simply describe the girl as a “friend” destroyed by opium, one critic even describing her as her sister (and not, it appears, as a sister of womanhood), for which there is utterly no evidence. In his Kino Classics DVD commentary, Anthony Slide—granting all the good film and critical writing he has done—is far too busy analyzing the type font of the intertitle card, the intertitles taken in the restored version from a Czech film and translated into English—to actually take the time out to read them. Between complaining about Beery’s beard and providing us with the actors’ death dates and ages, he, suggests that Cassie’s feelings for Molly are inexplicable, particularly since her attempts to get Molly back to America don’t really amount to much as she soon disappears from the plot.

      I argue, however, that Molly is essential to the entire story. For it is while Cassie is sitting a Mollie’s side that she gets the brilliant idea of selling her wardrobe to the highest bidders of the cabaret prostitutes waiting below, and with that money hopes to win far more at the race track, enough to allow her to take Molly back to the US. When the tip she has been given proves to be mistaken and she loses everything, her only other choice is to travel to Hang Chow, smuggle out opium herself, and discern whether or not the foreigner is indeed an undercover agent.

      The complexities of the film which arise after that voyage may take the movie in other directions, but the impetus for all Cassie’s actions up until her visit to Hang Chow are based entirely upon her love of what is obviously her lesbian partner, Molly. How else to explain how a mostly unfeeling woman, who Jarvis calls to her face—without knowing that he is speaking of the woman he knows as Lucille Preston—the “scum of the earth” is suddenly so determined to save a woman from the very drug which she herself peddles and give up her career by returning her to safety? How else to explain the woman in her bed?

       And knowing this is behind Cassie’s/Lucille’s actions, we must reinterpret any notions that by the end of the film she has grown desperately in love with Jarvis, ready to battle it out with the woman who really loves the government agent he proves to be, Rose Li (Anna May Wong), daughter of the evil local drug king Dr. Li.

     Critics have often argued that once Cassie, pretending to be Lucille Preston, a writer, arrives in Hang Chow, her motives become confused, as she appears to quickly become intrigued by the goodness of Jarvis. While she is certainly evil in her original intentions, discovering a letter he is about to mail to government authorities and replacing it with an envelope filled with empty pages—an act which Rose Li observes attempting to warn the naïve “spy” Jarvis—she  does seem to falter after spending an evening in discussion with the highly principled and handsome white man, the kind which Cassie has certainly rarely encountered in her stay in China. Indeed, at one point she seems ready to admit her crime and the reason for her visit.

      But Repin, who has followed her to Hang Chow to protect his interests and Dr. Li who now knows about Jarvis’ governmental ties, intercede. And when she attempts to explain the matter to Jarvis he now rejects her, knowing what she is without her needing to confess.

     She later admits to Repin that she has attempted to tell Jarvis that she loved him but that he has rejected her, which is why she is now willing to smuggle out the opium bricks by herself.

      Accordingly, that has led many critics and viewers to believe that she truly loves Jarvis— important if you want to believe after the attack on the village by the mountain poppy growers, the Jhanzi, that Jarvis saves her out of love. But even the film’s final intertitles hint she may not at all be saved: “But who will say if Cassie Cook’s soul didn’t find cleansing in the flames too?” The fact is, even if visually the film has restored a seemingly family unit—Cassie, Jarvis, and Billy Hepburn—they are not, any of them, destined for a familial relationship I’d argue. We don’t know if Billy’s missionary parents survived. And although Jarvis may believe he is, after all, in love with Cassie, it is doubtful that she will wander off with him.

       If there has been any shifting of Cassie’s values, it has all happened long before she arrived in Hang Chow. She was ready to give up the drug trade for the sake of Molly. And hearing of Jarvis’ views, she might very well have felt sympathy and even admiration for him, but not, I suggest, love. She has attempted up until the last moment to escape with the opium in order to save herself and Molly. If she ultimately chops up the bricks of opium up in the midst of the Jhanzi attack it is not out of love, as Rose Li assumes it must be, as much as out of disgust for all the troubles it has given her. We witness almost until the final moments that she still has little love for even the frightened Billy, pushing and pulling him away, as I mentioned earlier, even as he begs her for help. 

      Finally, we discover Jarvis is himself something of a blunderbuss, demanding the natives attempt to defend their own city from the Jhanzi, which with the final scenes depicting the entire city afire, was obviously a hopeless cause from the start, as the natives in their own attempts to flee seemed to recognize. Even though Rose Li ultimately saves his life, Jarvis has been all along blind to her true love, and doubted her word against Cassie’s when she told the truth about Cassie stealing his letter, preferring to believe the white lie rather the Asian truth.  Like all white men in Asian societies, he has come bumbling in, causing catastrophe after catastrophe through his ignorance and the moral values he insists upon imposing on a society to which he does not belong.

      Surely by the end of the film, the smart and self-protecting Cassie must realize that Jarvis himself is a fraud.

      The genre itself of the evil woman in power that Browning has created around Priscilla Dean cannot allow her full conversion without totally destroying the genre and disappointing her audiences, gloating in her most successful battles with conventional society.

 

     No, in my reading, Cassie does not put her arms around Jarvis’ neck as Billy squeezes in between their legs, but heads back to Shanghai, free finally of both Dr. Li and Repin, as well as the onus of the drug trade. She will most certainly find another way to raise the money in order to get Molly, her lover, out of harm’s way.   

      I should add, however, that the film’s battles in the last several scenes are so stupendous, almost matching images out of D. W. Griffith’s early works and Manfred Noa’s Helena, films of a year later, representing the most fascinating moments of filmmaking in the entire work, they certainly tempt one to imagine, perhaps, everything has changed after. But even if the movie has forgotten Molly, I’d wager Cassie has not. 

       

*To be fair, she does eventually show some feelings for the missionaries’ son, Billy, as she attempts to save him. But throughout much of the film she is severely child allergic, pretending to like them only as a front when the caring hero Captain Arthur Jarvis (Matt Moore) is around.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).