The Bitter Tea of General Yen

#25 in my ranking of Frank Capra’s filmography.

Frank Capra’s productions are getting larger and more impressive as he racks up more and more successes for Columbia and Harry Cohn. It’s unfortunate that the impressive physical production isn’t matched by the script which, I think, doesn’t connect at the level it needs to in order to really work. Moving back into the realms of melodrama after the more purely Capraesque American Madness and bringing back his favorite leading lady, Barbara Stanwyck, Capra tells the unusual romantic tale of an American woman and a Chinese general in the middle of the Chinese Civil War, providing a clash of cultures narrative that seems more interested in the cultures than the individuals to a certain extent.

Megan Davis (Stanwyck) arrives in Shanghai to marry Dr. Robert Strike (Gavin Gordon), a missionary dedicated to the service and conversion of the Chinese people to Christianity. When he receives news on their wedding day that an orphanage is caught amidst the fighting, he and Megan go to rescue the remaining children, and event that leads to Megan getting knocked unconscious and kidnapped by General Yen (Nils Asther). The bulk of the film takes the pair to his summer palace where he ignores the war in favor of his preferred conquest of Megan who resists but finds him ultimately intriguing.

This large block, pretty much the final hour of the almost ninety-minute film, is the meat of the action, and it’s a little dance between the two main characters as Megan tries to negotiate her own release, communicate with the outside world, but mostly resisting Yen’s efforts at seduction. It starts with the Chinese trappings of luxury, especially around clothes, and turns into a back and forth around Chinese art. All of this happens while the small circle around Yen, starting with his American financial advisor Jones (Walter Connelly), his concubine Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), and his bodyguard Captain Li (Richard Loo), all who have their little dramas to play out, mostly out of fear of Yen, like Mah-Li and Captain Li’s little romance which is a cover for a counterintelligence operation for Ye’s enemies.

My central problems with all of this are twofold. The first is that the ancillary stuff feels largely underdeveloped and forgotten for stretches that work against it. The actual reality around Yen’s command is murky and unclear, at best, so when the film tries to expand beyond the palace to some events around a train filled with money, it’s not so much that it comes out of nowhere, it’s that there’s precious little context around things. Who is fighting whom and what they want. Since Yen is a main character, why he’s leading a division in the Chinese Civil War seems like a pertinent question, especially since his character is one half of a romance.

The second problem is the romance itself. I do not get why Megan falls for Yen other than the fact that Yen is powerful and exotic. Okay, maybe that’s enough in reality, but in this drama, it feels unsupported. For instance, her time at the palace starts with her waking to the sound of gunfire as Yen’s man execute bands of prisoners, justifying it as mercy since they’ll either die quickly by the bullet or slowly by starvation, an overall attitude that Megan finds disgusting. Yen’s solution is to move the executions to a spot where she can’t hear it, and it’s never brought up again. It doesn’t need to be addressed in some great manner, but Yen doesn’t actually change all that much. He just kind of forgets the war around him. He pushes his uncivility out of view. It’s an attempt to manipulate Megan, for sure, but this manipulation undermines the romance. In fact, I was convinced that she was just going to get away from him until the film’s final moments. I just didn’t see her connecting with him.

And that’s despite Capra’s first real efforts at surrealism in depictions of Megan’s dreams where she imagines Yen saving her from another, more caricature version of Yen. I definitely saw her fighting some underlying attraction for him as a man (tall, handsome, powerful), but I never saw her being any more than repulsed at his treatment of the people around her, especially Mah-Li. I don’t think the bending of Megan’s will towards Yen was properly established.

That being said, it’s not like I hate the film. If the ending had turned differently, I think I might have been more supportive of the film overall. I really thought it was going one place, and then it went somewhere else that I did not think the film had actually worked towards.

And yet, there’s nothing wrong with the production. Stanwyck is great as always. Asther plays a Chinese man very well (though the makeup people made him look more like a Vulcan than a Chinese man with those eyebrows). Connelly gets the showoff role, being detached and amusingly sarcastic as he keeps his place at Yen’s table. The physical production is really impressive with Capra moving his now-typical bouts of chaos from the end of his films to the beginning of this one with the riots and military action in the streets of Shanghai, the film choosing to end on a much smaller note than American Madness.

So, I admire the film but don’t really connect with it. It’s an admirable effort from Capra as he stretches Columbia resources, but it’s something of a disappointment after the raging success that was his previous film.

Rating: 2.5/4