The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) - film review

When Megan Davis arrives in Shanghai to marry her fiancé, a missionary worker named Robert Strike, the country is in the midst of a bloody civil war.  Whilst attempting to rescue orphans trapped in a battle zone, Megan is separated from her fiancé and is knocked unconscious.  When she awakes she finds herself in the palace of General Yen, one of the most notorious leaders of the warring factions.  Megan is both fearful of the General and strangely attracted towards him.  She is disgusted by his ideas of morality, by the casual way he orders his opponents to be executed.  And yet she is fascinated by him and soon begins to form an emotional attachment for him...

Perhaps the most surprising and atypical of Frank Capra’s films, The Bitter Tea of General Yen is an exotic and sophisticated melodrama that explores the complex relationship between East and West in the early 1930s.  It was a daring, indeed provocative, film for its time, since it depicted a romantic liaison between an American woman and a Chinaman, and this may have been the main reason for the film’s poor showing at the box office.  It was this failure which effectively derailed the career of the 36-yeat-old Capra.  For the next few years, he was relegated to directing low budget comedies before he regained the confidence of his studio bosses.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen was the fourth film in a row which Capra made with Barbara Stanwyck cast in a leading role.  Playing opposite Stanwyck is the Danish actor Nils Asther, heavily made up as a Chinaman, presumably because good Chinese actors were hard to come by at the time.  The performances from both actors are laudable, lending the film an intense poignancy, without nudging it into irksome sentimentality.

What is particularly noteworthy about this film is Joseph Walker’s beautiful chiaroscuro cinematography, which, along with the ornate costumes and sets, is highly evocative of Chinese culture, adding to the film’s poetry and mystique.  Not only does this give the film its sensual dreamlike texture, it also conveys something of the horrifying reality of a country descending into anarchy.  The film has some interesting expressionist touches (including a stunning dream sequence) and, stylistically, has something of the character of what would later be termed film noir.

© James Travers 2008

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