With miscegenation their common theme, The Cheat (1931) has been coupled with Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) at Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", reeling at the Roxie Theater on Sunday, March 4 in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print. "An exotically adventurous film from a most unexpected director!" Lavine exclaims, "A beautiful American missionary is, through fate, thrown into a romantic interlude with a charismatic Chinese warlord. Breaking many Hollywood taboos—mainly the issue of miscegenation and, in this case sprinkled liberally with simmering displays of passion—Bitter Tea is a primal slice of pre-code erotica, a film that will amaze you from start to finish!"
In his autobiography The Name Above the Title (1971, The Macmillan Company), Frank Capra admitted it was because he had to get an Oscar® that he decided to film The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Secretly, he had thought his previous film American Madness (1932) would score him the statuette and—when he expressed his disappointment to Harry Cohn—Cohn told him, "Forget it. You ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk." "Okay," Capra decided, "If the Academy voted only for arty films (not true), I would make the artiest film they ever saw—about miscegenation! That ought to stir up some arty votes." (Supra, p. 140)
For Capra it was easy to consider Barbara Stanwyck for the role of the young American missionary Megan Davis, who he envisioned as "externally frigid but internally burning with her 'call.' " It was General Yen who proved a casting problem. "I knew what I did not want," Capra wrote, "a well-known star made up as an Oriental. I looked for a tall, overpowering, real Chinese. But there were no tall Chinese in casting directories, or even in laundries; most Chinese-Americans were short Cantonese. After many interviews we settled on a not-too-well-known Swedish actor, Nils Asther. He was tall, blue-eyed, handsome; spoke with a slightly pedantic 'book' accent; his impressive face promised the serenity and mystery of a centuries-old culture.
"But how could we make a Swede look Oriental? His blue eyes would photograph steel-gray in black-and-white film. That was an unusual plus. But what about the slant of his eyes? The prevailing method of 'changing' Caucasian eyes into Oriental ones was to stretch and tape the outer ends of the eyes towards the ears, fooling practically nobody. Besides which the actors looked more hideous than Oriental. There must be a better, more natural way. There was.
"Closely studying Chinese features, I noticed two major differences between Oriental and Caucasian eyes: One, the upper Oriental eyelid is smooth and almost round, lacking the crease, or fold, of the Caucasian eyelid; and, two, Oriental eyelashes are much shorter than Western eyelashes. We followed up the two clues: The make-up man covered Nils Asther's upper eyelids with smooth, round, false 'skins,' and clipped his eyelashes to one-third their natural length. Without adding any other make-up we made photographic tests of Asther's face. On the screen he looked strange—unfathomable. The stiff, upper eyelids kept his eyes in a permanent half-closed position. Of a certain he was not a Caucasian—and his face looked natural, uncontorted! Bedecked in Mandarin costumes, and a fez-like, black, tall skullcap for added height, Asther could pass for an awe-inspiring warlord. I added one final touch: an eccentric walk—long slow strides with both his long arms moving back and forth together—in parallel—with each stride. By keeping the camera low to accentuate height, Nils Asther became General Yen—ruthless, cultured, mysterious, and devastatingly attractive."
But not without incident. "In clipping Nils Asther's eyelashes, we forgot that long eyelashes protected Caucasian eyes against harsh light. The first day we exposed him to the glare of studio sun arcs he came down with the worst case of eyeburn (klieg eyes) studio doctors had ever seen. He was ordered to remain locked up in a dark dressing room between shots, and to wear dark, red glasses during rehearsals. Only during actual photography did we expose his unprotected eyes to the sun or studio lamps. Despite those precautions, Asther suffered constant acute pain throughout the whole picture. Fearing for his eyesight, doctors attended him night and day, administering poultices, eyedrops, and pain killers. Yet the gallant Swede gave a performance that one has to call an elegant tour de force." (Supra, pp. 141-142)
"The result of these labors, not surprisingly," wrote David Sterritt for his Turner Classic Movie essay, "is a Hollywood stereotype." Less dismissive and, perhaps, my favorite write-up on The Bitter Tea of General Yen is Kevin Lee's for Senses of Cinema: "Back then, audiences could not accept a film that showed a Chinese man and a white woman achieving unprecedented levels of intimacy. Today, audiences may regard the white characters' stereotypical denunciations of Chinese culture, or the interracial love story with the Chinese romantic lead played by a Swedish actor in yellowface makeup, with either camp irreverence or a queasy sense of shame for Hollywood's racist legacy. It is a film orphaned between historical and cultural norms." Veined with poignant subjectivity, Lee qualified: "I think the film's failure to find a home within a prevailing social convention was what made me fall in love with it. ... This is what I find to be of such value in The Bitter Tea of General Yen; that it risks offence for the sake of constructing a dialogue, one fraught with so many perils in the realms of politics, religion, cultures and sex, that it would not be worth it if it weren't necessary. Despite the social prejudices that informed its production, it dared to carve out a space where two people might live not as Chinese and American, heathen and Christian, man and woman, but just 'you and me'—while reckoning soberly with the impossibility of achieving such a space. Whatever faults it may have, its daring puts contemporary films of similar subject matter to shame."
Though The Bitter Tea of General Yen once again failed to secure Capra his desired Oscar®—"Damn those Academy voters! Couldn't they recognize a work of art when they saw one?"—it did bear the honor of being the first film to open the Radio City Music Hall in January 1933, even though scandalized audiences convinced the Hall to shorten the film's scheduled two-week run to eight days. The theme of miscegenation had been "made palatable and attractive as a natural outcome of passions molded by tumultuous times" (Wikipedia) and that proved unacceptable to the prejudices of the time, which contributed to the film's dubious distinction of being one of only two Capra films to lose money at the box office. As Barbara Stanwyck phrased it, "The women's clubs came out very strongly against it, because the white woman was in love with the yellow man and kissed his hand. So what! I was so shocked [by the reaction]. It never occurred to me, and I don't think it occurred to Mr. Capra when we were doing it" (quoted in Joseph McBride, The Catastrophe of Success, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992, p. 281).
Matthew Kennedy hosted a brunch in honor of Photoplay Productions, this year's recipient of the Silent Film Festival Award, whereat he introduced me to Kevin Brownlow. Brownlow was quick to disavow credit for the discovery of the Metropolis print found in Buenos Aires, Argentina, though he remained flattered by Fernando Peña's sentiment at the previous evening's screening that—if it were not for Kevin Brownlow—many archivists, Peña included, would not have become enamored with and dedicated to the preservation and restoration of silent films.
Brownlow carries himself with Old World elegance, mannered and respectful, though a bit cautious when strangers rush up to fawn over him. This is, perhaps, the wisest policy. On stage, however, he is in full command of his persona: erudite, generous and compelling. He and his colleague Patrick Stanbury accepted the 2010 Silent Film Festival Award from SFSFF Executive Director Stacey Wisnia on behalf of Photoplay Productions, who provided SFSFF the 35mm print of Frank Capra's The Strong Man (1926), courtesy of Douris, Ltd. As Brownlow mentioned earlier to Wisnia, he has been studying silent film longer than the era of silent film lasted.
"When I first started involving myself in screening and presenting silent films 40+ years ago in the 1960s," Patrick Stanbury stated in his acceptance of the award, "I couldn't dream of the possibility of not only restoring films but bringing them back to a large audience in such a wonderful theater as this. I'm delighted to be here in San Francisco and very grateful for this award. Photoplay has always believed in putting back the best possible quality prints on the screen and the film you're going to see today—The Strong Man—is an exceptional print made off the original negative, better than which you should not be able to get. And here to tell you more about this...." Stanbury conceded the microphone to Kevin Brownlow.
Expressing that it was marvelous to be at SFSFF at long last, Brownlow admitted he was most impressed "in every direction" with the souvenir program and its well-researched essays. He wondered what he could possibly add to Roberto Landazuri's contribution? He was equally impressed with the enthusiasm of the audience and hoped to ship them all out to England when they do their silent film festival. Confirming as "very true" the SFSFF slogan—"True art transcends time"—, Brownlow added that it is equally true when they say that art is the concealment of effort. Nothing proves that more than The Strong Man, starring Harry Langdon.
"Once upon a time," Brownlow reminded, "Harry Langdon was the fourth great comedian. Now he's fallen into undeserved obscurity. Certainly, he was a quieter comic than the others—you had to concentrate harder—but, he was highly rewarding. His was a simple child-like and immensely vulnerable character who stared at the world like a startled white mouse.
"This masterpiece comedy somewhat disconcertingly starts in WWI, Harry being a Belgian soldier captured by a German who turns out to be Zandow the Great [Arthur Thalasso]. After the war this strong man is invited to America and takes Harry as his assistant. They search for Mary Brown, a girl who wrote to him in the trenches and a surprising number of women admit to being Mary Brown. Capra and co-writer Arthur Ripley and, incidentally, an uncredited Tay Garnett cleverly weave the social problems of the 1920s—prohibition, organized crime, prostitution—into the comedy.
"Harry manages to meet Mary Brown and finds she's blind. Her father, a pastor, objects to Harry marrying her because of his work in the music hall. One night when he has to stand in for the strong man, he causes a riot. It's interesting that Charlie Chaplin should choose a blind girl for his own love interest in his own great comedy City Lights. Chaplin had one of those magpie minds that would pick up an idea, forget where it came from and it would come out as his, which I think is a legitimate artistic method of production.
"Priscilla Bonner who played the blind girl remembered Frank Capra as 'very sure of himself'; but, you know, there are so many conflicting facts about this picture and no two historians ever seem to agree on them. ...But Langdon was so reassured—and this comes from Photoplay, after who we named our company—that he went on a golfing holiday, leaving Capra and Ripley to work on the story for the next film Long Pants and that proved to be a miserable experience.
"Capra told me that Langdon read the wonderful reviews from New York—people went crazy for this man—and [Langdon] just couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle the renown and success. So when he made Long Pants, he said, 'I want to do more pathos.' [Capra] said, 'No, no, pathos is already in your comedy.' [Langdon] said, 'Do you know more than those critics in New York?'
"Biographer Joseph McBride talked with Priscilla Bonner and she described the difficult situation that followed: Langdon and Ripley freezing Capra out in a situation that left a most unsatisfactory film for Langdon—that was Long Pants—and also for Capra. Langdon fired Capra with the next film. That was the end of what might have been an incredible run of comedies had Capra and Langdon stayed together. Getting rid of such a brilliant partner was the kind of dumb thing that Langdon might have done in one of his comedies.
"Last year in Bologna we saw a series of exceptional films—silent and early sound—which demonstrates that Capra was among the brightest talents in a business already crammed with talent. ...Joseph McBride's book is called Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992). Yes, he was full of self-confidence. Capra claims Langdon did not create his character, he did! He and Arthur Ripley. This has been contested by biographer Joyce Rheuban [Harry Langdon: The Comedian as Metteur-en-Scène, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1983] who says the character was well-established in vaudeville before Langdon went anywhere near pictures. What Ripley and Capra were able to do was to recognize what made Langdon unique and to let him be himself on film.
"Whether you agree with McBride's study of Capra's character or not, you have to acknowledge he was a superlative film director and—in this case—he was working with a superlative comedian and a superlative cameraman Elgin Lessley, Keaton's cinematographer, who was the main cameraman on The Strong Man.
"By coincidence, it was the first silent film that I saw on a nitrate print from the Museum of Modern Art who totally by accident had sent it to the National Film Theatre. I hope you get something of the same thrill that I got." [That coincidence is fondly remembered in Brownlow's recent Sight and Sound essay on "the luster of nitrate."]
Cross-published on Twitch.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) is the biggest and most prestigious event of its kind in the Americas—and it's going to be even bigger for its 15th anniversary edition which begins Thursday. This year the fest expands from three days to four and will feature a massive 18 programs from seven countries. The line-up includes works by well known directors (Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, G.W. Pabst) and stars (Laurel and Hardy, Louise Brooks, Norma Talmadge), as well as rarities like The Flying Ace, a 1926 film that features an all African-American cast. And as a special treat, David Shepard and Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films have curated a selection of shorts by George Méliès (the French fantasist best known for 1902's A Trip to the Moon), which will play throughout the festival.
If you've been to the SFSFF before, you don't need me to tell you what a fabulous, class act it is and why it's become a "destination festival" for silent film enthusiasts around the world. The programming is eclectic and fun, the best available 35mm prints are used, the cream of silent film accompanists are hired to do their thing and best of all, it all goes down in our beloved 1922 movie palace, the Castro Theater. As the SFSFF says in its mission statement, "Silent filmmakers produced masterpieces and crowd-thrilling entertainments. Remarkable for their artistry and their inestimable value as historical documents, silent films show us how our ancestors thought, spoke, dressed and lived. It is through these films that the world first came to love movies." And it's through the SFSFF that I've come to love silent movies. Here's a cursory walk through the 2010 line-up.
Thursday, July 15
7:00 P.M. The Iron Horse (1924, USA, dir. John Ford)—In response to the success of Paramount's The Covered Wagon in 1923, Fox studios made this idealized epic about the building of America's trans-continental railroad. Filmed mostly in Arizona with a cast and crew of over 6,000 people, it was Hollywood's first big-scale western and is sometimes referred to as "the silent How the West Was Won." Cattle drives, Indian attacks, saloon brawls—things which later became clichés of the western genre—are said to have had their origins here. George O'Brien, now best known for F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, stars as a railroad surveyor whose childhood sweetheart marries the man who killed his father. The film culminates with the 1869 driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, and Wild Bill Hickcok, Buffalo Bill and Abraham Lincoln all make fictionalized appearances. Dennis James, who owns the only existing 35mm print of the American version of The Iron Horse, will accompany it on the Mighty Wurlitzer.
Friday, July 16
11:30 A.M. Amazing Tales from the Archives: Lost & Found Films—One benefit of having an extra day in the festival is that we get two "Amazing Tales" programs. This first one features presentations by Joe Linder from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, plus Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. The latter duo are now superheroes to silent film lovers everywhere, having discovered a 16mm dupe negative of Fritz Lang's Metropolis that was 25 minutes longer than any previously known version (the restoration of which will be shown at the festival later in the evening.) Donald Sosin accompanies. FREE ADMISSION!
2:00 P.M. A Spray of Plum Blossoms (1931, China, dir. Bu Wancang)—This film is one of several collaborations between its prolific director and China's favorite on-screen couple of the silent era, Ruan Ling-yu and Jin Yan (tragically, Ruan would kill herself at age 24). Loosely based on Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, this adaptation is set in the Chinese army circa 1930 and follows two old friends who become rivals for the same young woman. "Like any Shakespeare comedy, Plum Blossoms is replete with star-crossed lovers, mistaken identity and a satisfying happy ending." Donald Sosin accompanies.
6:00 P.M. Rotaie (1929, Italy, dir. Mario Camerini)—Virtually unknown to American audiences, this late-era Italian silent is noted for its German expressionist influence. Two down-on-their-luck young lovers plan suicide, until they find a lost wallet on a train. They're lured to a seaside resort by a high society sleazeball, who then tries to seduce the girl while her lover gambles away their money at the roulette wheel. A sound version of this film would be released two years later. There will be a live English translation of the original Italian intertitles. Stephen Horne accompanies.
8:15 P.M. Metropolis (1927, Germany, dir. Fritz Lang)—If there's a "star" of this year's SFSFF, it's undoubtedly the new "complete" version of Lang's expressionist masterpiece of futuristic dystopianism. The last Metropolis restoration occurred in 2001 and it screened at the SF International Film Festival with the fest's former artistic director Peter Scarlett translating the German intertitles. At the time, it was believed the world would never see a more complete version. As I mentioned above, a 16mm print of Metropolis with 25 additional minutes was discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008—and those minutes are said to contain not just scene trims, but entire subplots. Just as importantly, the Argentine discovery reinstates Lang's original editing, which in previous restorations has been a matter of conjecture.
The digital restoration of the new material, still clearly identifiable due to the ravages of time, took one year and 600,000€ to complete. This will be the only film at the SFSFF to be screened digitally, which for better or worse is the only format that distributor Kino International is releasing. Argentine archivists Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña will be on hand to do an introduction, and the incomparable Alloy Orchestra will perform their celebrated original score which has been expanded to accommodate the new material. And don't forget to check out the festival's Metropolis Photo Booth, courtesy of the San Francisco Film Museum. Metropolis is now on "rush" status, which means tickets are only obtainable by purchasing a Festival Pass, or by making a Patron or Grand Patron donation to the festival—or by waiting in the "rush" line and hoping for the best.
Saturday, July 17
10:00 A.M. The Big Business of Short Funny Films—A few years back the SFSFF instituted a Director's Pick program and the pickers have included Terry Zwigoff and Guy Maddin. This year's selection is by Pete Docter, the Oscar-winning director of Pixar's Monsters, Inc. and Up, who has chosen to screen three comedy shorts. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle directs himself and Buster Keaton as a cook and waiter respectively in 1918's The Cook. Inducted into the National Film Registry in 1998 is the Hal Roach-produced Pass the Gravy, a 1928 yarn about a prize rooster and feuding neighbors. Then in the 1929's Big Business, Laurel and Hardy play California Xmas tree salesmen whose argument with a customer escalates into all-out war. Pete Docter will be interviewed by Leonard Maltin and Dennis James will be this program's accompanist.
12:00 P.M. Variations on a Theme: Musicians on the Craft of Composing and Performing for Silent Film—The title says it all. The panelists in this special program comprise a who's who of silent film composers and accompanists, including pianists Donald Sosin and Stephen Horne, organist Dennis James, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, the Alloy Orchestra, and Swedish musician and composer Matti Bye. Chloe Veltman, Bay Area culture correspondent for The New York Times and producer and host of NPR's VoiceBox, will moderate.
2:00 P.M. The Flying Ace (1926, USA, dir. Richard E. Norman)—Between 1920 and 1928, white film producer/director Richard E. Norman made six feature films that sought an alternative to the demeaning portrayal of African-Americans found in silent cinema. His production company turned out everything from westerns to comedies to gangster flicks, but unfortunately, The Flying Ace is the only one that survives today. In this film, a WWI fighter pilot returns home a hero, only to become embroiled in a battle against railroad thieves. Introducing the film will be Rita Reagan from the Norman Studios Film Museum in Jacksonville, Florida. Donald Sosin provides accompaniment.
4:00 P.M. The Strong Man (1926, USA, dir. Frank Capra)—This slapstick comedy was Capra's second feature, and it stars Harry Langdon as a Belgian soldier who comes to America in search of the female pen pal he corresponded with during the war. He's accompanied by German strongman performer Zandow the Great, whom 98 lb. weakling Langdon must replace when the great one becomes incapacitated. This will be my first Langdon film and from what I read, his wide-eyed, man-child persona is an acquired taste. Those who love him rank Langdon with the greats like Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, and many consider The Strong Man his best film. Prior to the screening, the 2010 Silent Film Festival Award will be presented to Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury. Their company Photoplay Productions specializes in restorations of silent era films, many of which have graced the SFSFF over the years. Stephen Horne accompanies this one.
6:30 P.M. Diary of a Lost Girl (1929, Germany, dir. G.W. Pabst)—After obtaining incendiary results with Pandora's Box, Pabst and leading lady Louise Brooks collaborated once more on this story of a girl's ruination and a young woman's regeneration. After getting pregnant by her pharmacist father's lecherous assistant, Brooks' character is sent packing to a hellish girl's reform school. She manages to escape, then dabbles in prostitution en route to becoming a countess. The restoration being screened at the festival was made by the Cineteca di Bologna and includes seven minutes of previously censored footage. I only experienced Pandora's Box for the first time several nights ago, courtesy of Netflix' Watch Instantly, so now I'm really hot to catch this follow-up on the big screen. This SFSFF Centerpiece Film is also the Founders Pick, chosen by the festival's originators Stephen Salmons and Melissa Chittick. The film will be introduced by actor/writer/director and SFSFF board member Frank Buxton, and the fantastic Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will provide the accompaniment.
9:30 P.M. Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922, Denmark/Sweden, dir Benjamin Christensen)—In the early 1980s, there was a Bay Area cable station that only screened public domain movies, and it screened the same ones repeatedly. That's where I first caught late-night bits and pieces of this seven-chapter, reverie-disturbing "documentary" exploring "the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients." Reportedly the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, it was banned in the US for depictions of torture, nudity, satanic worship, sacrilege and sexual perversion. Come for the comprehensive tour of medieval torture devices; stay for the flying witches kissing the ass of Satan (portrayed, as is a brief appearance by Jesus, by the director himself). Making their SFSFF debut accompanying Häxan is Sweden's Matti Bye Ensemble.
Sunday, July 18
10:00 A.M. Amazing Tales from the Archives: First the Bad News…then the Good!—In this second set of Amazing Tales, clips and slides will be used to discuss various silent film preservation issues. First up is the Library of Congress' Mike Mashon, who will talk about the "fascinating and devastating reality of American silent film survival rates." He'll be followed by Annette Melville from the National Film Preservation Foundation, who will "present a way to bring back some of this history via a major international repatriation project." More good news—the presentation will include a newly preserved print of the 1920 Mutt and Jeff cartoon, On Strike! FREE ADMISSION!
12:00 P.M. The Shakedown (1929, USA, dir. William Wyler)—The great William Wyler directs James Murray (King Vidor's The Crowd) as a boxer who travels from town to town staging rigged fights, until he meets up with an orphan and a benevolent waitress who inspire him to mend his ways. Leonard Maltin will be on hand to interview the Wyler children about their father, and Donald Sosin will accompany the film.
2:30 P.M. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929, USSR, dir. Dziga Vertov)—I recently watched this avant-garde masterpiece for the first time in 30-plus years on Netflix' Watch Instantly, accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra's rip-roaring, magisterial score. It unequivocally Blew. Me. Away.—and I can scarcely believe I'll be seeing it on the gigantic Castro screen with the awesome Alloys performing live! If you got shut out of seeing them perform with the sold-out Metropolis, this ought to make for one helluva consolation prize. Hell on Frisco Bay's Brian Darr has done the program notes for this, which I anxiously anticipate reading.
4:30 P.M. The Woman Disputed (1928, USA, dir. Henry King, Sam Taylor)—Norma Talmadge makes her final silent film appearance in this tale of a prostitute who's unable to escape her past. Set in Austria during WWI, her character is coveted by an Austrian and a Russian officer, and she must spend "a night of passion" with the latter in order to save the townspeople who've scorned her. Based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, the film co-stars Talmadge's off-screen lover, Gilbert Roland. Stephen Horne provides accompaniment.
7:30 P.M. L'heureuse mort (1924, France, dir. Serge Nadejdine)—The 2010 SFSFF closes with a French comedy that captivated the festival's staff at last year's Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Théodore is a failed Parisian playwright who falls off a boat while on holiday and is presumed drowned. When he returns home and learns that that his plays are now all the rage, he impersonates his own brother in order to perpetuate the posthumous acclaim that eluded him while "alive." Director Nadejdine was previously a ballet master in Russia, a job he'd take up again after moving to the US. The character of Théodore is played by Nicolas Rimsky, who also wrote the screenplay from a novel by Countess Baillehache. Leonard Maltin will introduce the film and the Matti Bye Ensemble will accompany it.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
With miscegenation their common theme, The Cheat (1931) has been coupled with Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) at Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", reeling at the Roxie Theater on Sunday, March 4 in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print. "An exotically adventurous film from a most unexpected director!" Lavine exclaims, "A beautiful American missionary is, through fate, thrown into a romantic interlude with a charismatic Chinese warlord. Breaking many Hollywood taboos—mainly the issue of miscegenation and, in this case sprinkled liberally with simmering displays of passion—Bitter Tea is a primal slice of pre-code erotica, a film that will amaze you from start to finish!"
In his autobiography The Name Above the Title (1971, The Macmillan Company), Frank Capra admitted it was because he had to get an Oscar® that he decided to film The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Secretly, he had thought his previous film American Madness (1932) would score him the statuette and—when he expressed his disappointment to Harry Cohn—Cohn told him, "Forget it. You ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk." "Okay," Capra decided, "If the Academy voted only for arty films (not true), I would make the artiest film they ever saw—about miscegenation! That ought to stir up some arty votes." (Supra, p. 140)
For Capra it was easy to consider Barbara Stanwyck for the role of the young American missionary Megan Davis, who he envisioned as "externally frigid but internally burning with her 'call.' " It was General Yen who proved a casting problem. "I knew what I did not want," Capra wrote, "a well-known star made up as an Oriental. I looked for a tall, overpowering, real Chinese. But there were no tall Chinese in casting directories, or even in laundries; most Chinese-Americans were short Cantonese. After many interviews we settled on a not-too-well-known Swedish actor, Nils Asther. He was tall, blue-eyed, handsome; spoke with a slightly pedantic 'book' accent; his impressive face promised the serenity and mystery of a centuries-old culture.
"Closely studying Chinese features, I noticed two major differences between Oriental and Caucasian eyes: One, the upper Oriental eyelid is smooth and almost round, lacking the crease, or fold, of the Caucasian eyelid; and, two, Oriental eyelashes are much shorter than Western eyelashes. We followed up the two clues: The make-up man covered Nils Asther's upper eyelids with smooth, round, false 'skins,' and clipped his eyelashes to one-third their natural length. Without adding any other make-up we made photographic tests of Asther's face. On the screen he looked strange—unfathomable. The stiff, upper eyelids kept his eyes in a permanent half-closed position. Of a certain he was not a Caucasian—and his face looked natural, uncontorted! Bedecked in Mandarin costumes, and a fez-like, black, tall skullcap for added height, Asther could pass for an awe-inspiring warlord. I added one final touch: an eccentric walk—long slow strides with both his long arms moving back and forth together—in parallel—with each stride. By keeping the camera low to accentuate height, Nils Asther became General Yen—ruthless, cultured, mysterious, and devastatingly attractive."
But not without incident. "In clipping Nils Asther's eyelashes, we forgot that long eyelashes protected Caucasian eyes against harsh light. The first day we exposed him to the glare of studio sun arcs he came down with the worst case of eyeburn (klieg eyes) studio doctors had ever seen. He was ordered to remain locked up in a dark dressing room between shots, and to wear dark, red glasses during rehearsals. Only during actual photography did we expose his unprotected eyes to the sun or studio lamps. Despite those precautions, Asther suffered constant acute pain throughout the whole picture. Fearing for his eyesight, doctors attended him night and day, administering poultices, eyedrops, and pain killers. Yet the gallant Swede gave a performance that one has to call an elegant tour de force." (Supra, pp. 141-142)
"The result of these labors, not surprisingly," wrote David Sterritt for his Turner Classic Movie essay, "is a Hollywood stereotype." Less dismissive and, perhaps, my favorite write-up on The Bitter Tea of General Yen is Kevin Lee's for Senses of Cinema: "Back then, audiences could not accept a film that showed a Chinese man and a white woman achieving unprecedented levels of intimacy. Today, audiences may regard the white characters' stereotypical denunciations of Chinese culture, or the interracial love story with the Chinese romantic lead played by a Swedish actor in yellowface makeup, with either camp irreverence or a queasy sense of shame for Hollywood's racist legacy. It is a film orphaned between historical and cultural norms." Veined with poignant subjectivity, Lee qualified: "I think the film's failure to find a home within a prevailing social convention was what made me fall in love with it. ... This is what I find to be of such value in The Bitter Tea of General Yen; that it risks offence for the sake of constructing a dialogue, one fraught with so many perils in the realms of politics, religion, cultures and sex, that it would not be worth it if it weren't necessary. Despite the social prejudices that informed its production, it dared to carve out a space where two people might live not as Chinese and American, heathen and Christian, man and woman, but just 'you and me'—while reckoning soberly with the impossibility of achieving such a space. Whatever faults it may have, its daring puts contemporary films of similar subject matter to shame."
Though The Bitter Tea of General Yen once again failed to secure Capra his desired Oscar®—"Damn those Academy voters! Couldn't they recognize a work of art when they saw one?"—it did bear the honor of being the first film to open the Radio City Music Hall in January 1933, even though scandalized audiences convinced the Hall to shorten the film's scheduled two-week run to eight days. The theme of miscegenation had been "made palatable and attractive as a natural outcome of passions molded by tumultuous times" (Wikipedia) and that proved unacceptable to the prejudices of the time, which contributed to the film's dubious distinction of being one of only two Capra films to lose money at the box office. As Barbara Stanwyck phrased it, "The women's clubs came out very strongly against it, because the white woman was in love with the yellow man and kissed his hand. So what! I was so shocked [by the reaction]. It never occurred to me, and I don't think it occurred to Mr. Capra when we were doing it" (quoted in Joseph McBride, The Catastrophe of Success, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992, p. 281).
