The Red Lantern, Nazimova and the Boxer Rebellion

A gorgeous new book and DVD has been published around the 1919 Alla Nazimova/Noah Beery film The Red Lantern (which included Anna May Wong’s screen debut when she was just 14, though she’s uncredited and you have to look hard). Apparently only one print remains in existence and it’s been cleaned up for this DVD release. the story is good old fashioned Yellow Peril Chinoiserie of the highest order – in China, a half-Chinese, half white woman falls in love with a missionary’s son. When he rejects her for an American girl, she joins the Boxers in order to avenge herself on the white race. The film was a sexy shocker at the time – all that Orientalism combined with the oh so Russian Nazimova (about who rumours swirled of her sexuality). The book includes essays on the boxers, western interpretations of 1900 and the traditions of “yellow face” and white actors playing Chinese. Lovely bit of packaging too.

Available from Amazon or direct from the publishers

“Presenting The Greatest Actress of the Day, NAZIMOVA, The Star of a Thousand Moods.” (Auckland Star, 24 August 1920)

The Red Lantern tells the story of a Eurasian, Joan of Arc-like heroine, set against the background of China’s 1900 Boxer Rebellion. The film was an instant success, thanks to an unprecedented advertising campaign and the star qualities of diva Alla Nazimova. Both aspects are extensively discussed in this publication.

In the book, essays sketch the historical outline of the Boxer Rebellion, while special features on the DVD include early cinematic actualities that evoke the way in which the Boxer Rebellion was portrayed in the Western media around the turn of the century, true to the myth of the ‘Yellow Peril’. Popular photo and theatre plays of the day thrived on Oriental stereotypes and relied heavily upon exotic set designs and costumes. Famous actors of European descent, wearing ‘yellow face’ makeup explored the exciting dangers of interracial love.

Extras on the DVD tentatively reconstruct a Chinese programme from the time of the film’s premiere and show how ‘authentic’ portrayals of Chinese life were combined with cartoons and Oriental musical fantasies. Many contemporary film reviewers saw The Red Lantern as a film marked with the “stamp of historical and ethnological authenticity”, thanks to Nazimova’s mastery of the art of metamorphosis. The different emotions that Nazimova’s face and eyes could express became legendary in trade magazines and were documented in newsreels, included in the extras, which were shown in cinemas all over the world.