Plot Intro
A Chinese peasant farmer, Wang Lung (Paul Muni) marries a young servant girl who works in a grand house called O-Lan (Luise Rainer). The film then charts their lives over a number of decades as they cope wi
Doug says...
Let’s just get it out of the way. The six principals in this film about a Chinese farmer trying to survive in China are played by white American/Canadian/Scottish actors.
Paul I’m sure will go into this in more detail. From my angle, it’s incredibly wrong, and the yellow-face make up that is evident even through a black and white film is pretty excruciating. This film should have been made with Chinese actors, and the fact that everyone but the principals is of Chinese heritage just makes it more awkward. This wasn’t down to a lack of available actors.
What makes this more difficult, is that this is a pretty good film. Director Sidney Franklin takes the Epic approach, filling it with huge scenes of revelry, riots and more. The scene when a mob storms into one of the old stately homes is stunningly shot, enthralling and quite quite frightening. The scene when locusts attack the farmers’ crops is similarly epic and disgusting. For Franklin, the very way he makes this film is artful and results in memorable, gripping scenes. It would be much easier to address the casting debacle by simply saying this film was bad. But it wasn’t.
Luise Rainer too is far far better than her award-winning performance in the previous year’s The Great Ziegfeld. She starts softly, and slowly conveys strength and utter devotion without the dull piety that Janet Gaynor sometimes fell foul of. It’s a great performance, it’s just a shame it’s one she shouldn’t have been licensed to give. It’s the last time we see Rainer in this project, and it’s nice to know she was capable of very good performances. Sadly she didn’t do well in later life, and that is a real shame as some of the acting choices she makes here are sophisticated, subtle and smack of a real intelligence.
It’s interesting that The Good Earth and Gone With The Wind are both very well executed Epics, and both have issues around their treatment of race. With The Good Earth, it’s in their refusal to cast Chinese actors as Chinese roles. With Gone With The Wind, it’s how the film pictures the plight of black slaves. Both won awards, and both have received praise and criticism in equal measure.
I’d like to finish by drawing attention to one of the Chinese actors who appear in this. Roland Lui, who does some really good work as the handsome Younger Son, was a football star and talented artist who went into movies. This film was his big break, and he appeared in several films across the ‘30s and ‘40s before going into the army. After WWII ended, he became a salesman before dying at the age of 32 when he fell off a ferry in 1948 in a freak accident. A forgotten actor, and with hints here of real talent, it’s sad to see the promise of what could have been.
Highlight
The scenes when a rioting mob break into a stately home are terrific. It’s frightening and chaotic, and the moment Rainer is terrified she’ll be shot for looting is genuinely gripping.
Lowlight
It’s such a shame they turned away from having a Chinese cast. I can’t help but imagine that if they had, this would be extraordinary.
Mark
7/10
Paul says...
As Doug says, this is a problematic one. All the characters in this tale are Chinese and none of the six main ones are played by Chinese or Chinese-American actors. The only Asian-Americans in the cast play small roles, many of which are some of the classic Asian stereotypes. It’s not a huge surprise when we consider the time period of the movie. The previous film, The Great Ziegfeld, featured a white man blacked up as a minstrel which wasn’t unusual at the time, and the Civil Rights Movement was still 30 years away. Asian actors indeed have been given a difficult time historically, often pushed into the roles of computer geniuses, mysterious and cunning villains, or comedic buffoons. The 2018 release of Crazy Rich Asians, one of the very, very, VERY rare occasions when a Hollywood movie features an majority-Asian cast, and Parasite’s magnificent Best Picture win at the Oscars, are stark reminders that even today successful Asian actors usually adhere to a character stereotype or stick to Chinese, Japanese or Korean cinema.
In our last blog post, I discussed Luise Rainer’s meteoric rise and rapid decline after her double-Best Actress win in the late-'30s. So here I’m going to provide more background to this movie, because it’s utterly fascinating.
The Good Earth is based on a smash-hit 1931 novel by Pearl S. Buck. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel and, in 1938, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Buck was an American but worked extensively as a missionary in China in some of its most turbulent years. She actually sounds like a pretty good egg. Although a Christian missionary, she believed in respecting Chinese people’s choices not to convert; she wrote the novel to increase awareness of Chinese culture in the Western world; she battled for Chinese people to be able to live safely and with equal rights in the USA, including trying to get rid of the perception of Asian babies as “unadoptable” in the American adoption system.
Although many critics say that she succeeded in increasing American sympathy for the Chinese during the war years, other critics disagree. I haven’t read the novel myself, so I can’t comment on that. But it was certainly a popular read because some Hollywood studio threw a whopping $2.8 million at this movie, and it took 3 years to make (an immensely long time in '30s cinema).
Both Buck and producer Irving Thalberg originally envisioned an all-Asian cast but Thalberg decided not to believing that the white-dominant society of the West was not ready. Sadly, he may have been right. We’ll never know.
The roles of Wang Lung and O-Lan were hot property in the acting world (similar to the “Who will play Harry Potter?” hype). Interestingly, there were rumours that O-Lan would played by an actress called Anna May Wong. Wong was one of a number of Asian American actors popular at the time (albeit completely typecast), and influential in modelling and fashion. However, the Hays Code demanded the role not go to her because Paul Muni had already been cast as O-Lan’s husband and the Code did not allow interracial coupling on screen (even if the two characters were the same race but the actors weren’t, apparently). So Rainer got the role and Wong was offered the part of Lotus, a tiny, unsympathetic character. Wong furiously declined and the role went to a white actress called Tilly Losch.
Paul Muni and Luise Rainer were the Day-Lewis and Streep of their day, and they had both won Best Actor and Actress the previous year so having their names on the posters would certainly sell the movie. It’s a saving grace that neither of them try to put on a Chinese accent, although neither of them look remotely Asian. Muni himself said that he looked as Asian as Herbert Hoover.
The Good Earth was a hit. It fits in well with the increasing demand for big-scale epics about people battling political and social upheavals, something which 1930s audiences would have certainly identified with after the Wall Street Crash and during the rise of fascism and communism across the world.
In terms of scripting and story, it’s not bad at all. If the actors were all Asian then it would probably remain a highly-regarded work. It features some stunning set pieces such as a riot in the city during the revolution, and a swarm of locusts ransacking fields of wheat. It has a good pace, decent acting and an involving story, and Rainer is much more controlled and nuanced than in The Great Ziegfeld, her other Best Actress win. But it’s hard to focus on its merits or its shortcomings because seeing white actors pretending to be Chinese, surrounded by many Asian extras, is not only contributing to institutional racism, it’s also just plain weird.
Highlight
When O-Lan manages to loot some jewels from a ransacked palace, then finds herself nearly a victim of a firing squad, is immensely tense. Rainer does well to show O-Lan’s courage, her desperate looks for a way out, and her attempts to hide her fear that the stolen jewels will be discovered.
Lowlight
I’ll give you three guesses what my lowlight is going to be.
Mark
I’m going to, controversially, abstain. I don’t feel comfortable giving the film a high mark due to it’s strong story-telling and production, nor do I want to just bullshit a low mark to score morality points. I think this is a piece of work that should be treated more as an objective historical record in cinematic and racial history, rather than as a piece of art.
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