Drifting
About Drifting
In Shanghai, Cassie Cook has been selling opium and is now tied to her rival, Jules Repin, who has promised a big shipment. She is in debt for new gowns and needs passage money for Molly, an invalid from the drug. Cassie goes to Hang Chow, near the poppy fields, and meets Captain Arthur Jarvis, who pretends to reopen a mine while he hunts the dealers. She poses as a novelist and nearly tells him the truth. Repin stirs local rebels, the settlement is fired, and Rose Li shoots Repin as he is about to kill Jarvis. Cassie and Jarvis get out with a missionary's young son.
Cast & crew
More about Drifting
Tod Browning directed and wrote the script with A. P. Younger, from the Broadway play by John Colton and Daisy H. Andrews. Carl Laemmle produced it. William Fildew photographed it and Errol Taggart edited it. Universal released it on August 26, 1923. The play had starred Robert Warwick and Alice Brady.
Themes
Making
Browning and Younger adapted Colton and Andrews's stage play for Universal, with Dean in the role Alice Brady had played on Broadway.
Look
William Fildew photographed the Shanghai and Hang Chow scenes.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
Prints are at Gosfilmofond in Moscow and at the George Eastman Museum. In 2012 the National Film Preservation Foundation gave a grant to preserve a print whose Czech intertitles were translated back into English.
Notes
- Priscilla Dean plays Cassie Cook, also called Lucille Preston. Matt Moore plays Jarvis. Wallace Beery plays Repin.
- Anna May Wong plays Rose Li, daughter of Dr. Li (William V. Mong).
- Edna Tichenor plays Molly. Rose Dione plays Madame Polly Voo. J. Farrell MacDonald plays Murphy.
- Bruce Guerin plays the missionary's boy, Billy Hepburn.
Scenes
- Rose Li shoots Repin as he is about to kill Jarvis.
- Rebels set fire to the settlement at Hang Chow.
Influenced by
- Drifting, the play by John Colton and Daisy H. Andrews
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Drifting (1923).webm)
