The Bitter Tea of General Yen **** (1932, Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, Walter Connolly, Toshia Mori) – Classic Movie Review 6776

‘The flaming drama of a forbidden love that wrecked an empire! ‘ ‘They found a love they dared not touch!’ Ah yes, great! Director Frank Capra’s sexy 1932 beauty-and-the-beast romantic melodrama stars Barbara Stanwyck as Megan Davis, an engaged American missionary who arrives in Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War to marry the missionary Dr Robert Strife (Gavin Gordon).

He postpones the wedding to rescue orphans, and the couple are separated in the crowd on returning to Shanghai with the children. General Yen rescues Megan after she is hit in the head and brings her by train to his palace.

But Capra’s wartime drama tells mainly of Megan’s consuming compulsion for the Chinese warlord General Yen (Nils Asther), who takes her captive and plans to make her his mistress when they fall in love.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen is ravishingly erotic and other-worldly, somewhat dated of course, but still powerful, and the young Stanwyck had an extraordinary radiance, a rarest of qualities that she shows off here at its most luminous. It is beautifully shot in black and white by Joseph Walker.

Asian actors were not given main parts in American films back then, so General Yen is played by Swedish actor Asther, who uses a Mandarin dialect for the role.

Based on the 1930 novel by Grace Zaring Stone, it is the film that was chosen to open New York’s Radio City Music Hall on 11 January 1933. The theatre scheduled it for a two-week run but pulled it after eight days and $80,000 in grosses with a loss on its rental fee. Stone visited the set and said she was impressed by its realism but that Stanwyck, cast by Capra, was wrong casting for Megan.

It is notable as one of the first films to deal openly with interracial sexual attraction. It was a box office failure, which Stanwyck blamed on racist backlash, but has long since grown in critical opinion.

In 1932, the British Board of Censors demanded cuts to approve the film. In 1950 the film was not re-released as planned in America when the Production Code Administration decided the film’s characterisations of Americans and Chinese and a scene in which the heroine offers herself to the general were ‘very questionable’.

In 1932, Chinese embassy officials in Washington complained about the film’s depiction of the treatment of war prisoners and some language about the Chinese people, such as ‘human life is the cheapest thing in China’.

Also in the cast are Toshia Mori as Mah-Li, Walter Connolly as Jones, Gavin Gordon as Dr Robert Strike, Lucien Littlefield as Mr Jackson, Clara Blandick as Mrs Jackson, Richard Loo as Captain Li, Robert Wayne, Knute Erickson, Ella Hall as Mrs Amelia Hansen, Arthur Millette, Helen Jerome Eddy as Miss Reed, Emmett Corrigan as Bishop Harkness, Jessie Arnold, Nora Cecil and Martha Mattoc.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen is directed by Frank Capra, runs 88 minutes, is released by Columbia, is written by Edward E Paramore Jr, based on the novel by Grace Zaring Stone, is shot in black and white by Joseph Walker, is produced by Frank Capra and Walter Wanger and scored by W Franke Harling.

Columbia reused the sets for One Night of Love (1934).

Chinese antiques and art objects worth $200,000 were used as set decorations, including $7,000 on a bronze incense burner.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6776

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com