Where East Is East is a 1929 film directed by Tod Browning, starring Lon Chaney.
"Tiger" Haynes (Chaney) is a big-game animal trapper in French Indochina, in the area that would later become Laos. He has a beloved daughter, the half-Asian Toyo (Lupe Vélez). A young American, Bobby Bailey, is in Indochina to take custody of Tiger's tigers and take them back to his father's circus. Bobby and Toyo have fallen in love. Tiger the Papa Wolf dad is initially against the relationship but good-natured Bobby wins his trust.
Enter Madame de Sylva, an older Asian woman with a rapacious sexual appetite. She sees handsome young Bobby on a riverboat and nearly succeeds in seducing him before a horrified Tiger yanks Bobby off the boat. When an angry Bobby accuses Tiger of jealousy, Tiger drops the bomb: Madame de Sylva is Toyo's long-lost mother.
Tenth and last film which Browning and Chaney collaborated on; Chaney would make only two more movies before he died of cancer in 1930.
Tropes:
- Betty and Veronica: Toyo is the Betty—innocent, sweet, cheerful almost to the point of Genki Girl. Her mother Madame de Sylva is mysterious and alluring and sexually adventurous and a little bit evil.
- Chekhov's Gun: It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going to happen when the film stops to note that 1) Tiger keeps a gorilla, and 2) the gorilla remembers and hates Madame de Sylva, who used to mistreat it back in the day.
- Dragon Lady: Madame de Sylva is a perfect example: sexy, mysterious, dresses in a Qipao, Really Gets Around. Her servant warns Tiger about her and Bobby: "White boy like sheep with tiger!"
- Great White Hunter: Great White Animal Trapper. The first scene shows Tiger and his crew capturing a tiger by climbing up into the trees and dropping a net on a tiger as it enters a clearing.
- Interchangeable Asian Cultures: A meta example. The film is firmly established as being set in Laos, but all the signage is in Chinese and characters say stereotypically Chinese things like "honorable ancestors".
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Toyo tells Bobby this directly after finding out about him and her mother, saying she only wants him to be happy. This causes him to snap out of his fixation on her mother and beg Toyo's forgiveness.
- Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow: Bobby the white guy has fallen in love with half-Chinese Toyo.
- Misplaced Wildlife: No gorillas in southeast Asia.
- Parental Abandonment: Madame de Sylva walked out on Tiger and Toyo soon after Toyo was born.
- Sibling Triangle: Nope, not this, but the rarer and squickier mother-daughter love triangle.
- Yellowface: Typical for the era. Caucasian Estelle Taylor and Mexican Lupe Velez play Asian and half-Asian characters, respectively.
