With consumers increasingly using their phones, their cards, and sundry online services to pay for this, that, and the other thing, does anyone use cash anymore? If not, what kind of attention is being paid to commemorative coins? In 2022, The U.S. Mint announced the American Women Quarters Program, a multi-year initiative that will honor notable contributors to American life, among them Maya Angelou, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Edith Kanakaʻole, whose “moʻolelo, or stories, served to rescue aspects of Hawaiian history, customs, and traditions.”

Among the initial group of honorees gracing our 25-cent piece is Anna May Wong — 1905-1961 — an American actress of Chinese descent whose career traversed the silent era, the advent of sound, and television. “The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong,” a prime-time detective series tailored for Wong by the DuMont Television Network, was the first to feature an Asian-American as a lead. When DuMont closed its doors in 1956, the company dumped its entire stock of programs into the Hudson River. Wong’s trailblazing television program has, for all intents and purposes, been lost to history.

Not her filmography. Though Wong’s career had its frustrations, fits, and starts, she became a celebrity, a fashion plate, and something of a rebel. She received laudatory reviews as the lead in the early color film “The Toll of the Sea” (1922) and caught the eye of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who cast her in a small but indelible role in “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924). Still, her frustration with the parts major studios were offering, usually as a supporting exotic, led Wong to make films overseas, first in Germany and, later, England. In an irony that could not have been lost on the actress, Paramount asked her back to America because she was seen as having a European pedigree. 

Not that her American return was without its bumps. On the promise of working with the director Josef von Sternberg, Wong took on the part of the offspring of arch-villain Fu Manchu, Princess Ming Loy, in “Daughter of the Dragon” (1931). Wong did subsequently work with von Sternberg in the Marlene Dietrich vehicle “Shanghai Express” (1932). Still, Wong continued to suffer the kind of indignities you might expect of the time. MGM nixed her for the lead role in “The Son-Daughter” (1932) because, ahem, Wong proved “too Chinese to play a Chinese.” The role went to Helen Hayes.

At the end of this month, Milestone Films will be releasing a Blu-ray of “Piccadilly” (1929) utilizing a restoration overseen by the British Film Institute. This was Wong’s last silent film and, by some lights, her best performance. Should you not realize that the picture was filmed during the actress’s tenure in Old Blighty, the trio of passing double-decker buses that feature the opening credits should be a giveaway. The role essayed by Wong isn’t much of a stretch: Shosho is a dishwasher who works her way onto the stage by dancing in an ornate oriental outfit. Wong left Hollywood for this?

As it turns out, Shosho is a complex character, an ambitious and not entirely sympathetic bundle of contradictions. After nightclub owner Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas) encounters a fussy client with a dirty dish — Charles Laughton in one of his first screen appearances — he charges into the recesses of his establishment only to discover a scullery maid strutting her stuff to the delight of her peers. Shosho is summarily dismissed but not forgotten, particularly given that Mabel Greenfield (Gilda Gray), Valentine’s star attraction and inamorata, is allowing her diva-ish ways to get the better of her.

What follows is a remarkably naturalistic melodrama rife with cultural conflict, illicit love, and murder. Director E.A. Dupont brings a remarkable fluidity to the proceedings, as well as a keen eye for composition and lighting. Yet this is Wong’s movie: she commands the screen with an intelligence that is no less formidable for being a tad tongue-in-cheek. Employing her supple frame as a locus for extravagant fashion — costume designers must’ve loved working with her — Wong is a sex symbol of notable self-possession on par with Dietrich herself. Indeed, Wong would go on to undermine the German chanteuse‘s thunder in “Shanghai Express” and, if we’re going to tell tales out of school, she is reputed to have undermined Dietrich’s heart as well. Milestone Films has done right by a pioneering actress and a film of no small merit.