Eddie Valiant and Jessica Rabbit enter Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).
One of the things I learned from John Ashbery was to be myself, especially when it came to film, the topic we talked about most, and poetry was a close second. He showed me that I could be a fanboy because I was one. He insists that I have nothing to be ashamed of in my enthusiasm, from campy sci-fi films and bad Ed Wood horror films to Yasujiro Ozu’s stationary cameras and Hong Kong film noirs starring Chow Yun-fat. Although John was a shy man, and kept to himself a lot, he was not afraid to be silly, serious, and emotional about a made-up world that to him was more real than the world we live in. John and I talk about movies, directors, actors and actresses, cameramen, everything related to movies. He once sent me a VHS of Wood’s Feast of the Dead (1965), starring strippers in a cemetery at night, and is guaranteed to be in “pristine condition.” Another time, knowing I was interested in “yellowface” and all the non-Asian actors and actresses playing 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 silent film actress Anna May Wong, I met a man at a film memorabilia fair who published a monthly newsletter about Hollywood minor stars from the silent film era. The cheaply produced staple publication consists of a short article summarizing the subject’s career, where they are currently (often in an assisted living facility), and their filmography. John was thrilled that I gave him a two-year subscription, which he then renewed, and he said: “Do you think he’ll run out of stuff?” John can’t get too many movies. He was endlessly fascinated by the people who lived in what his friend, Frank O’Hara, called in his poem, “Ave Maria,” “glamorous country.” This essay is about the adventures John and I had while watching and talking about movies and TV shows, as well as the various rabbit holes I discovered and rushed down.
***
One night, John and I watched That 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 who owns extensive land outside the city of Singapore.
In the first scene, we see Leslie walking determinedly across the terrace while firing a gun at a man, who has just walked quickly out of his bungalow. He continued shooting at her, even after she fell down the stairs and lay on the ground.
We learn that the dead man’s name was Geoff Hammond. According to Leslie, the reason he shot her was because she was “trying to fuck with me,” and he wanted to protect her honor.
The real story, of course, is that Leslie and Geoff are having an affair, and he becomes jealous when he learns that Leslie has recently married a Eurasian woman (played by Gale Sondergaard) and, in fact, never fell in love with her.
Important information about their affair is contained in letters owned by Hammond’s widow.
Leslie’s lawyer, Howard Joyce (played by James Stephenson) learns of the existence of the letter from his clerk, Ong Chi Seng (played by Sen Yung).
Seng took his lawyer and client, Leslie Crosbie, to meet the widow in Chinatown. Sondergaard, who furrows her brows and frowns in the film but never utters a word, has Bette Davis show her the envelope containing ten thousand dollars before dropping the letter to the floor. Refusing to touch the money, he handed the envelope to his servant, who was smoking an opium pipe.
This was the best role Sen Yung had in a career that spanned forty years. It’s clear from the way he plays this smooth-talking, cunning, obsequious employee that he never really got a chance to shine, and that the only roles he was able to get afterward were simply parodies of what white moviegoers thought about Asians. Race is the real movie code, not how much sex can be shown.
Two years earlier, Sen Yung made his film debut as Jimmy Chan, “son number two”, in Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938), ostensibly replacing “son number one,” played by Keye Luke. Between 1938 and 1942, Yung played Jimmy Chan eleven times. It’s the best an Asian-American actor could hope for—a small recurring part as a comedic character playing a racist stereotype in a B-grade series.
Between 1959 and 1973, Yung played casual cook Hop Sing in TV series Source of profit. Of course this is all the Chinese can do in television series: cook, jump, sing, jump and die. Because Source of profitthe name Hop Sing became synonymous with the stupid Chinaman. In martial arts films The best of the best (1989), starring 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 get smaller… and you’ll open the 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, possibly under the name Victor Sen Yung.
Victor Sen Yung as Jimmy Chan and Willie Best as Chattanooga Brown in Dangerous Money (1946). Monogram Image, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
***
One evening John and I went to Tribeca, to a small gallery space on Franklin Street, to see Joseph Cornell’s masterpiece, Rose Hobart (1936), a nineteen-minute collage film created by splicing and rearranging segments East Kalimantan (1931), a B movie starring Rose Hobart and Charles Bickford, along with a nature education film about an eclipse. A few days earlier, John had called and told me that he had read that there would be a screening of Cornell’s film, like the one he had first shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936, projected through a blue-tinted lens at a slowed speed consistent with a silent film. John thought it would be interesting to see Rose Hobart as Cornell first thought.
According to John, midway through the debut performance, with Cornell present, Salvador Dalí—out of jealousy, and one of the few in the audience who understood what Cornell had done—used his umbrella to knock over the projector, which Cornell was operating, shouting: “My idea for a film is just that, and I’m going to propose it to someone who will pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it’s as if you’ve stolen it!” Another source says Dalí shouted: “Joseph Cornell, you are a plagiarist of my subconscious mind!” Cornell, famously shy, was deeply distressed by this strange and inexcusable behavior, and stopped showing his films in public until the mid-sixties, when, with encouragement from Jonas Mekas, he began showing them again.
Rose Hobart sign Bruce Conner FILM (1958) for over twenty years. Made from footage Conner took from various films he had collected, including newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, Conner’s set FILM with a score featuring Ottorino Respighi Roman Pine.
The rest of Cornell’s films on the night’s list 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 of which is Rub Rednow (1955), Cornell’s version of Stan Brakhage Magic Ring (1955). Cornell “assigned” Brakhage with a gift of two tokens to make a film about the Third Avenue El, which was about to be torn down. Rub Rednow is so similar to Brakhage’s film that many mistakenly believe it to be nothing more than, as the title suggests, Magic Ring played backwards. This did not happen. Cornell only used a shot that didn’t reach Brakhage’s shot Magic Ring. This is a film that was made only from censorship.
Rose Hobart in the works of Joseph Cornell Rose Hobart (1936).
***
John told me I had to see it Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), live-action/animated mystery comedy starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, and Joanna Cassidy. In the Hollywood film version around 1947, cartoon or “toon” characters live side by side with humans.
Hoskins plays Eddie Valiant, a hard-nosed private eye who has a strong hatred for the “toon” hired to free 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 conversation between Eddie and Jessica when they first met.
JESSICA: You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman who looks like me.
EDDIE: Yes, you don’t know how difficult it is as a man to see a woman who looks like you.
JESSICA: I’m not bad, I’m just interested that way.
In his poem “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” whose title is taken from a 1938 animated short, John has Daffy ranting about the “cruel old” cartoonist who drew him, as well as contemplating his face in a hubcap, which is as tall as a duck. Need I point out that the hubcap is a cartoon version of a convex mirror?
He promised to get me out of this problem,
That’s a mean old cartoonist, but just look who he is
Done for me now! I almost didn’t dare to approach me because his mug was already weak
The reflection on the hubcap, it’s yellow, so… feel uncomfortable
Is its straightness—pleasant, of course, to some quack phrenologists
The waiting room is full of ferns, but it’s hard to say
Companionable.
Eddie Valiant and Jessica Rabbit enter Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).
John Yau is a poet, art critic, curator, and publisher, who has written many monographs, incl Joe Brainard: Personal Art. his essay book, Please Wait in the Coat Room: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Artwon the American Book Award, and his latest book of poetry is Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974-2024 (2025). “At the Movies with John Ashbery” is excerpted from the manuscript-in-progress, “That Glamorous Country,” a book about every film and TV show that Ashbery and the author watched or talked about together.
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