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October, 19 20
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As Miss Clayton remarks? "I feel as if this picture might with justice have called this 'The Charmed Life of Ethel Clayton'." As a matter of fact, her experiences in the Orient were thrilling enough as the country was more or less disturbed, and the producers considerably worried when the star failed to put in an appearance last year on schedule time. Work was awaiting her. She did not arrive on the steamer from her vacation, which she had elected to spend amid the flowers and picturesque scenes of Japan, Corea, and China.
When she did finally come home — on a later steamer — she was welcomed with open arms and at once renewed her activities for the screen. Several pictures intervened and then came "crooked streets."
Not the wharves of Shanghai, but a studio set taken in the tank of the Lasky Studio in Hollywood
rescue, as a true "movie" hero should, and invariably does.
The street scenes in Shanghai were fashioned after the life, particularly those on the banks of a river, with quaint native houses and small craft, flaunting banners with strange inscriptions and throngs of coolies and alien sailors about this water-front location.
In other scenes showing the Europeanized districts of the city the extra people numbered several hundred — many of them Chinese — until the studio began to assume a decidedly exotic atmosphere, which was increased by the smoke from numerous odoriferous pipes puffed by the orientals at every opportunity. While the Americanized Chinese played ball between shots on the open stages, the elders smoked or conversed fluently in their sing song tongue, and still more patriarchal men and women, wrinkled like parchment, sat and blinked at the sun and dreamed no doubt of distant rice fields and the soft strains of the somyen as ancient memories crowded into the busy present.
"No prohibition here," reads the conglomeration of fantastic letters on this Chinese sign, near which Ethel Clayton is standing
Shooting straight into a
street set representing some
curious corner of a far-off
Chinese town
And, as she observes, "I felt as if I were back in China and that a bandit might be peeping from behind every studio set was not difficult to imagine." This was particularly so because of the graphic quality of the settings. As an example of how genuine in appearance were these scenes it may be cited that among them were several that had actually been taken in the Orient. On the screen even studio experts could not tell one from the other.
In the picture, Miss Clayton is almost kidnapped by some minions of a mandarin who has seen the beauty of the stranger and try to capture her. Of course, they are foiled and the hero effects her