Stowaway

Stowaway (1936)

She sings and speaks Chinese!

Chin-Ching gets lost in Shanghai and is befriended by American playboy Tommy Randall. She falls asleep in his car which winds up on a ship headed for America. Susan Parker, also on the ship, marries Randall to give Chin-Ching a family.

Date of release
1936-12-25
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (27)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Adventure, Family
Director
William A. Seiter

Casting

Interesting facts

Stowaway is a 1936 American musical drama film directed by William A. Seiter. The screenplay by William M. Conselman, Nat Perrin, and Arthur Sheekman is based on a story by Samuel G. Engel. The film is about a young orphan called "Ching Ching" who meets wealthy playboy Tommy Randall in Shanghai and then accidentally stows away on the ocean liner he is travelling on. The film was hugely successful, and is available on videocassette and DVD.

Production

Temple learned forty words in Mandarin Chinese for the film, later stating the learning process required six months of instruction. She was taught by UCLA student Bessie Nyi. She encountered problems in her communication with the extras on the set, however, as she found out they were actually speaking a south Chinese dialect.

Production of the movie was held up for close to four weeks while first Alice Faye then Shirley Temple came down with the flu.

The dog in the film, a miniature Chinese Pekinese which was owned by the wife of a local photographer, was given to Temple and renamed Ching-Ching (after her character in the movie). Temple's mother worked out a trade in which Temple and her father would agree to pose for the photographer in exchange for the dog.

Temple's IQ was tested during the Stowaway period and found to be 155, the genius classification.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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