Anna May Wong guest stars in the title role of "China Mary," an episode of "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp." Wong had once had a colorful but turbulent career in Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s, mixing starring roles when she could get them with supporting roles as exotic "oriental" temptresses. (She played the daughter of Fu Manchu in one film.) Fed up with the limits Hollywood placed on her, she spent time in Europe from 1928-34, alternating films there and in Hollywood, where she was under contract to Paramount for most of the 1930s. She's particularly memorable as Marlene Dietrich's secretive traveling companion in SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932). She closed out her contract with B-movies, where she often got her most interesting roles (e.g. DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI), and starred in two low-budget war movies for PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), before a long period of relative inactivity. On her IMDb filmography, she has only two credits between 1942, when she did the war movies, and 1956, when she began making TV guest shots. After appearing on this "Wyatt Earp" episode, she made one more film and had one more TV role before dying of a heart attack in 1961 at the age of 56.
In this episode, she plays the unofficial boss of Tombstone's Chinese community. A series of robbery assaults on drunken whites late at night points to a group of Chinese men as the culprits. Marshal Earp goes to China Mary to get her help in identifying the assailants. She insists she'll take care of the problem herself. Earp goes undercover as a decoy and captures one of the men, Li Kung (Aki Aleong), and takes him to China Mary. In her office, Earp witnesses a generational confrontation between an immigrant leader who wants to accommodate the town officials to ward off threats of violence against Chinatown and an angry young man, bitter at the prejudicial treatment and bullying we've seen him experience, who wants to take matters into his own hands. At one point, Li Kung tells Mary, "You are a disgrace to our people." It's quite an affecting scene and Earp intuits that there is more to their relationship than what he's been told. The problem is eventually resolved in a sad and tragic manner.
Unlike other Asian-themed episodes of TV westerns I've seen, the key relationship here is between Chinese characters. None of them is subservient and none of them kowtow to the white characters. China Mary is the dominant figure in the episode and the director, clearly understanding what an asset he has in Wong, gives her lots of closeups. Earp always treats her with respect and the actor who plays him, Hugh O'Brian, shows similar deference to his illustrious co-star. I suspect that Ms. Wong was more like China Mary than most of the characters she played earlier in her career.
Curiously, the actor who plays Li Kung is billed in the show's end credits as John Baxter. He's identified as Aki Aleong here on IMDb, which seems right to me, since I've seen Aki Aleong in other things, including the western, BUCKSKIN (1968), which I've reviewed here, and the actor playing Li Kung sure looks like Aki Aleong.
I watched this episode on the Encore Western Channel.
I've reviewed three other Asian-themed TV western episodes on IMDb: Bonanza: "Day of the Dragon," with Lisa Lu; Cheyenne: "A Pocketful of Stars," with Lisa Lu; and Laramie: "Dragon at the Door," with Nobu McCarthy. There are a few others worth seeking out, including a "Wagon Train" episode with Sessue Hayakawa ("The Sakae Ito Story") and a "Rawhide" episode with Miyoshi Umeki ("Incident of the Geisha").
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