Eddie Valiant and Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).
One of the things I learned from John Ashbery was to be myself, especially when it came to movies, the subject we talked about most, with poetry a distant second. He showed me that I could be a fanboy because I was one. He made it clear that I did not need to be embarrassed about my enthusiasms, which ran the gamut, from the campy science fiction and badly made horror films of Ed Wood to the low-angled, stationary camera of Yasujiro Ozu and Hong Kong noir films starring Chow Yun-fat. Though John was a shy man, and kept a lot to himself, he was not afraid to be silly, serious, and emotional about an artificial world that was to him more real than the world we lived in. John and I talked about movies, directors, actors and actresses, cameramen, everything having to do with film. He once sent me a VHS of Wood’s Orgy of the Dead (1965), starring strippers in a graveyard at night, and guaranteed it was in “pristine condition.” Another time, knowing I was interested in “yellowface” and all the non-Asian actors and actresses who played Asians in films, he gave me a book on the subject that had been sent to him by an academic press. When I was doing research on the silent film actress Anna May Wong, I met a man at a movie-memorabilia fair who published a monthly newsletter about minor Hollywood stars from the silent era. The inexpensively produced stapled publication consisted of short articles summarizing the subject’s career, where they were at the present moment (often in an assisted living facility), and their filmography. John was very happy that I got him a two-year subscription, which he later renewed, and quipped: “Do you think he will ever run out of material?” John couldn’t get too much of films. He was endlessly fascinated by those who lived in what his friend, Frank O’Hara, in his poem, “Ave Maria,” called “that glamorous country.” This essay is about the adventures that John and I had while watching and talking about movies and TV shows, and the different rabbit holes that I discovered and I scurried down.
***
One night, John and I watched The Letter (1940), directed by William Wyler. Leslie Crosbie (played by Bette Davis) is married to Robert Crosbie (played by Herbert Marshall), a rubber-plantation owner whose extensive land holdings are just outside the city of Singapore.
In the first scene, we see Leslie walking determinedly across a porch as she fires a pistol at a man, who has just walked quickly out her bungalow. She keeps firing at him, even after he falls down the stairs and is lying on the ground.
We learn that dead man’s name is Geoff Hammond. According to Leslie, the reason she shot him was because he “tried to make love to me,” and she wanted to protect her honor.
The real story, of course, is that Leslie and Geoff were having an affair, and that she got jealous when she learned that he had recently married a Eurasian woman (played by Gale Sondergaard) and was, in fact, never in love with her.
The crucial information about their affair is contained in a letter that is in the possession of Hammond’s widow.
Leslie’s attorney, Howard Joyce (played by James Stephenson) learns of the letter’s existence from his clerk, Ong Chi Seng (played by Sen Yung).
Seng drives the lawyer and his client, Leslie Crosbie, to meet the widow in Chinatown. Sondergaard, who arches her eyebrows and frowns in the movie, but who never says a word, makes Bette Davis show her the envelope containing the ten thousand dollars before dropping the letter on the floor. Refusing to touch the money, she hands the envelope to her helper, who is smoking an opium pipe.
This is the best role that Sen Yung would get during a career that stretched across forty years. It is clear from the way he plays this smooth-talking, conniving, obsequious clerk that he never really got a chance to shine, and that the only roles he could get afterward were parodies of what white moviegoers thought Asians were like. Race was the real movie code, not how much sex could be shown.
Two years earlier, Sen Yung made his film debut as Jimmy Chan, the “number-two son,” in Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938), ostensibly replacing “number one son,” who was played by Keye Luke. Between 1938 and 1942, Yung played Jimmy Chan eleven times. This was the best an Asian American actor could hope for—a recurring bit part as a comedic character playing a racist stereotype in a B-grade series.
Between 1959 and 1973, Yung played the easygoing cook Hop Sing in the TV series Bonanza. This, of course, is all a Chinaman can do in a television series: cook, hop, sing, jump, and die. Because of Bonanza, the name Hop Sing has become synonymous with stupid Chinaman. In the martial arts film Best of the Best (1989), which stars James Earl Jones, one of the fighters, Travis Brickley, (played by Christopher Penn) says: “Raw fish? You keep eating that shit, you’ll end up like Hop Sing over there—your eyes will slant … your dick will shrink up … and you’ll open up a laundry!”
During his career, Sen Yung was also known as Sen Young, Victor Sen Young, and Victor Young. He is buried in Greenlawn Memorial Park, Colma, California, most likely under the name Victor Sen Yung.
Victor Sen Yung as Jimmy Chan and Willie Best as Chattanooga Brown in Dangerous Money (1946). Monogram Pictures, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
One night John and I go to Tribeca, to a small gallery space on Franklin Street, to see Joseph Cornell’s masterpiece, Rose Hobart (1936), a nineteen-minute collage film made by splicing and reordering segments from East of Borneo (1931), a B-film starring Rose Hobart and Charles Bickford, along with an educational nature film of an eclipse. A few days earlier, John called and told me that he had read that there was going to be a screening of Cornell’s film, just as he had first shown it at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936, projected through a blue-tinted lens at a slowed down speed consistent with silent films. John thought it would be interesting to see Rose Hobart as Cornell first conceived of it.
According to John, halfway through the debut showing, with Cornell present, Salvador Dalí—in a fit of envy, and one of the few in the audience to grasp what Cornell had done—used his umbrella to knock over the projector, which Cornell was operating, as he stormed out, screaming: “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if you had stolen it!” Another source has Dalí yelling: “Joseph Cornell, you are a plagiarist of my unconscious mind!” Cornell, who was notoriously shy, was understandably distressed by this outlandish and inexcusable behavior, and stopped showing his films in public until the mid-sixties, when, with the encouragement of Jonas Mekas, he began showing them again.
Rose Hobart presages Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE (1958) by more than twenty years. Made of found footage that Conner took from different films that he had accumulated, including newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, Conner set A MOVIE to a score featuring Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome.
The other Cornell films on the bill that night were made after World War II, when Cornell collaborated with Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, and Larry Jordan, all of whom made their own inimitable films. One was Gnir Rednow (1955), Cornell’s version of Stan Brakhage’s The Wonder Ring (1955). Cornell “commissioned” Brakhage with a gift of two tokens to make a film about the Third Avenue El, which was about to be torn down. Gnir Rednow is so close to Brakhage’s film that many wrongly believe that it is no more than, as the title suggests, The Wonder Ring played backward. This is not the case. Cornell used only shots that didn’t make it into Brakhage’s Wonder Ring. It is a movie made solely from outtakes.
Rose Hobart in Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936).
John tells me that I should see Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), a live-action/animated mystery comedy starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, and Joanna Cassidy. In the film’s version of Hollywood, circa 1947, cartoon characters or “toons” coexist with humans.
Hoskins plays Eddie Valiant, a hard-boiled private eye possessed by a strong hatred for “toons” hired to absolve the toon Roger Rabbit, who has been framed for murder. Roger is married to Jessica Rabbit, who is unfaithful, but not the murderer.
This is the exchange Eddie and Jessica have when they first meet.
JESSICA: You don’t know how it is being a woman looking the way I do. EDDIE: Yeah, well, you don’t know how hard it is being a man looking at a woman looking the way you do. JESSICA: I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.
In his poem “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” which gets its title from a 1938 animated short, John has Daffy mouth off about the “mean old” cartoonist who drew him, as well as pondering his countenance in a hub cap, which is duck-height. Need I point out that the hubcap is a cartoon version of a convex mirror?
He promised he’d get me out of this one, That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he’s Done to me now! I scarce dare approach me mug’s attenuated Reflection in yon hubcap, so jaundiced, so déconfit Are its lineaments—fun, no doubt, for some quack phrenologist’s Fern-clogged waiting room, but hardly what you’d call Companionable.
John Yau is a poet, art critic, curator, and publisher, who has authored numerous monographs, including Joe Brainard: Art of the Personal. His book of essays, Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art, won an American Book Award, and his most recent book of poetry is Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974-2024 (2025). “At the Movies with John Ashbery” is excerpted from a manuscript in progress, “That Glamorous Country,” a book about every movie and TV show that Ashbery and the author saw or talked about together.
Last / Next Article
Share