Madam Butterfly

Running Time: 1hrs 36min (including brief intro)

Rating: PG (Parental Guidance), contains heavy mature themes that may be triggering or require discussion with younger viewers

Sylvia Sidney, Cary Grant and Charlie Ruggles

Long before he became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Cary Grant appeared in this early sound adaptation of Madame Butterfly, one of the most influential and controversial stories in the history of Western representations of Asia. Adapted from the famous opera, itself based on earlier literary sources, the film tells the tragic story of a young Japanese woman who falls in love with an American naval officer, only to face heartbreak and abandonment.

Screening as part of our Cary Goes “East” strand, Madame Butterfly offers a fascinating opportunity to explore how Hollywood imagined East and South East Asia during the early twentieth century. While the film remains an important example of studio-era filmmaking, it also reflects many of the orientalist assumptions embedded within the original story and its subsequent adaptations. Audiences today may wish to consider how ideas of race, gender, power and cultural difference are constructed within the film, as well as the industry’s reliance on practices such as yellowface, which limited opportunities for Asian performers while shaping Western perceptions of Asia for generations.

The screening will be introduced by Dr Xin Peng (University of Cambridge), who recently curated the BFI’s recent Anna May Wong season. Dr Peng will place the film within the wider history of Hollywood’s representations of East and South East Asian people, cultures and places, helping audiences to engage critically with both its artistic achievements and its problematic legacies.

For Cary Grant audiences, the film offers another glimpse of a star still at the beginning of his journey. Appearing just a few years before his rise to international fame, Grant is still developing the screen persona that would later make him one of cinema’s most beloved actors. Seen alongside Singapore Sue, his first screen appearance, and Walk, Don’t Run, his final film, Madame Butterfly forms part of a unique day tracing the arc of Grant’s remarkable career while opening up wider conversations about representation, screen heritage and the changing ways audiences engage with classic cinema today.

Content notice: This 1932 Pre-Code film is rated PG. It contains mature themes including ritual suicide, child separation, and historical “yellowface” casting from that era which will be addressed in the pre-film introduction.

Dr Xin Peng is Assistant Professor in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College. She works primarily on early- to mid-twentieth century American film history, media technologies, and racialised labour. She’s published on talkies and early Asian American movie stars Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa; early Technicolor and Hollywood Orientalism; 1930s Busby Berkeley musical and racial capitalism; film historiography in relation to newsreel outtakes and lost silent film; and the “first” Chinese film actress, Yan Shanshan. Her book, The Call of the East: A Media History of San Francisco’s Chinese Telephone Exchange is forthcoming with the University of California Press in Spring 2027. An essay based on materials from this project, “‘The Chinaman and His Phone’: Noise, Gibberish, and the Telephone’s Social Use,” has won the Race and Histories of Technology Prize from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in 2024.  Dr Peng was the curator of a major retrospective, Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention, at the British Film Institute in September 2025. She has served as the book reviews editor of Early Popular Visual Culture, managing editor for Feminist Media Histories, and assistant editor for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

Tickets

Full Price, £8.50; Concession £5

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