The Hatchet Man (1932)

Interesting facts

The Hatchet Man (1932) is a pre-Code film directed by William A. Wellman and starring Edward G. Robinson. Warner Bros. Pictures had purchased the David Belasco/Achmed Abdullah play The Honorable Mr. Wong about the Tong gang wars. Made during the few years before strict enforcement of the Production Code, The Hatchet Man has elements that would not be allowed later, such as adultery, narcotics, and a somewhat graphic use of a flying hatchet.

Production

Contemporary reviews, including The New York Times, make the mistake of calling J. Carroll Naish's character “Sun Yat Sen” instead of Sun Yat Ming, a slip probably caused by familiarity with the name of the real Sun Yat Sen, one of the great leaders of modern China.

According to Naish's obituary in The New York Times, this was his first major film and the first of his many dialect roles, but he never played his own ethnicity—Irish.

Throughout the film, Music Director Leo F. Forbstein uses variations on “Poor Butterfly“, a popular song released in 1916. “Poor Butterfly” was inspired by Giacomo Puccinni's tragic opera Madama Butterfly.

The film was released in Britain as The Honourable Mr. Wong.

TCM's Brian Cady observes: “As was typical of the time, almost no Asian actors appear in the cast of a film set completely among Chinese characters. Makeup artists had noticed that audiences were more likely to reject Western actors in Asian disguise if the faces of actual Asians were in near proximity.

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