The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)

Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther
directed by Frank Capra

Capra is so underrated.  Modern critics consider him naive, while during his time he was considered a 'serious' film maker, maybe even too serious.  A source on wikipedia claims that some the the anti-trust legislation which eventually broke up the studio system was little more than blowback from 1939's Mr Smith Goes to Washington.  It upset so many people that Columbia had to launch a propaganda campaign, convincing the public that Mr Smith really was patriotic after all.  That's fodder for a Capra film in itself!

Capra movies are strange because, while he clearly was worldly-wise enough to understand the characters and their motivations (and this is some dark stuff!), he is also fiercely idealistic.  Megan, the main character, a proselytizing American in China, is foolish and naive, and yet the film takes her side; we are supposed to identify with her.  Some of Stanwyck's lines are corny and even racist, and yet Capra seems to realize this; it plays out in the story; Megan is a fool.  There's an ambiguity there which I don't yet understand.

I didn't understand the attraction between General Yen and Megan.  Some women find cruel people sexy.  I don't.  The General Yen character was all cold and passionate and scary kind of like the warrior character from that Kurosawa movie The Idiot.

The producer did a beautiful job of recreating China on the studio lot; the costumes are exquisite.

It's a difficult, slow movie.  A good deal of it is quite dull and formulaic; although I'm sure that the love-between-races theme was daring enough in its own time.  Of course the rather trite romance is something of a cover-up for a subtler dramatic exploration of the meeting of East and West. You can enjoy Bitter Tea on different levels, but it takes effort.