Drifting

The March 21 screening will be presented with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin. The March 24 screening will be a silent screening.

In his penultimate collaboration with Priscilla Dean, adapted from the Broadway play of the same name, Browning weaves an intricate crime drama that also features a pivotal supporting performance from 18-year-old Anna May Wong in one of her first film roles. Dean delivers a steely and multifaceted turn as Cassie Cook, a jaded young woman involved in the Shanghai opium trade whose sights are set on escape, as she has made up her mind to return to America with her drug-addicted friend Molly Norton (Edna Tichenor) in tow. Facing a shortage of cash, she retreats to Hang Chow, a small village near the poppy fields, to intercept a smuggling job organized by her rival-turned-colleague Jules Repin (Wallace Beery), but she is soon sidetracked by the task of sussing out whether the white engineer working to revive a decommissioned mine is, in fact, a government plant with a mandate to disrupt the town’s black market activities. 4K restoration courtesy of George Eastman Museum.