The Bitter Tea of General Yen

The Bitter Tea of General Yen

by Robert Horton

It was 1932, and Frank Capra was frustrated. True, he’d had some measure of success: nearly single-handedly, his movies were pulling punk Columbia Pictures out of the second (or maybe third) tier of Hollywood studios. The legendarily boorish mogul Harry Cohn trusted him with Columbia’s A-list productions, such as they were. And Capra was connecting with audiences through his gutsy films, which stuck to bread-and-butter box-office topics: rowdy adventures, populist comedies, and a series of socko women’s flicks with Barbara Stanwyck.

But the tough little Sicilian immigrant wanted more. He wasn’t yet “Frank Capra,” that name above the title from film history; in fact, he was Frank R. Capra (which never did look quite right), with the middle initial to class things up. He wanted attention. He wanted respect. He wanted an Oscar, dammit, but they didn’t give you Oscars for making delightful, crowd-pleasing comedies. They gave you Oscars for putting out that arty crap. Capra tried a socially-conscious story, torn from the Great Depression’s headlines—it was American Madness, a terrific movie and a warm-up for It’s a Wonderful Life. But the Academy voters didn’t bite, and neither did audiences. So Capra went further.

The movie was The Bitter Tea of General Yen, and Capra had never made anything—would never again make anything—quite like it. The story is set entirely in China, and in outline form it sounds like a romance novel, suitable for a wet-eyed magazine serial: American woman goes to the Mysterious East, is kidnapped by a powerful Chinese war lord, and falls in love with him. Yet the film is complex where the outline is simple, and Capra repeatedly surprises with his evocative direction—over seventy-five years after its making, General Yen still looks fresh.

The American woman is Megan Davis, about to join her missionary husband-to-be, the saintly and dull Dr. Robert Strike (Gavin Gordon), in China. Caught in an uprising, Megan is rescued by the elegant General Yen, who whisks her away to safety in his private train car. As Megan goes to sleep on the train, the general watches over her, in a silent and heavily erotic exchange that is observed by the general’s mistress, Mah-Li (Toshia Mori); Capra plays the moment without dialogue, which is exactly right.

Most of the remainder of the film is set in General Yen’s palatial estate, where the cherry blossoms drop their petals, lovers gambol in the moonlight, and prisoners are executed outside Megan’s bedroom window. It’s clear that Megan is attracted to the general, because Capra inserts a dream sequence into the movie that is absolutely the wildest thing he ever shot: Megan is menaced in her lavish bedroom by a sharp-toothed Chinese, the personification of the racist ideas spouted by the white missionaries in the opening scenes. Then, a dashing man with a mask enters, subdues the intruder, and removes his mask as he embraces Megan. Whoops! It isn’t heroic Dr. Strike—it’s General Yen. Not only is the punch line a surprise, but the sequence looks like something out a French surrealist movie, not a Hollywood studio picture.

The white missionaries are depicted as well-meaning but racist boobs; their dialogue in the opening reel is laced with smug, xenophobic dialogue (“Human life is the cheapest thing in China,” etc.). Meanwhile, Capra delivers his most sexually-charged movie, in which the straight-laced Megan is unhinged by the seductive atmosphere and the handsome, cultivated presence of General Yen. Capra and longtime cinematographer Joseph Walker create a shimmering world that owes something to Josef von Sternberg’s exotic Marlene Dietrich pictures. (People love Capra’s folksiness so much that he rarely gets credit for the visual mastery of his films, or their fantastically dynamic editing.)

Capra’s favorite leading lady of the period, Barbara Stanwyck, is superb as Megan, her flat American phrasings wrapped in silk gowns and erotic tension. If you’ve only seen Stanwyck as snow-haired matriarchs in The Big Valley or The Thorn Birds, and even if you love her later film noir ladies, it may come as a shock to see her as a vital, sexy young woman. Unable (or perhaps reluctant) to cast a Chinese performer as Yen, Capra opted for the tall Danish-born actor Nils Asther, who contributes an excellent performance. The chemistry between the two is like Anna and the King of Siam with a little bondage thrown in.

It goes without saying that the movie flopped (and inspired some openly racist reviews). Even being selected as the first motion picture ever to play Radio City Music Hall didn’t help. Capra later felt it was one of his very best films, and he was right, but it didn’t secure him the Oscar he so desperately wanted. A year after its 1933 release, Capra put aside the arty crap and returned to the bread and butter, and his little movie It Happened One Night stormed the Oscars in an unprecedented sweep of the major awards. Thus was General Yen relegated to a footnote to It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a place it most emphatically doesn’t deserve.

Originally published in 2000 for Film.com, in a series titled “The Best Films You’ve Never Seen.”