Seen at the time as an artistic statement, despite its worthiness today its a Hollywood embarrassment

Director: Sidney Franklin

Cast: Paul Muni (Wang Lung), Luise Rainer (O-Lan), Charley Grapewin (Old Father), Tilly Losch (White Lotus), Walter Connolly (Uncle), Jessie Ralph (Cuckoo), Soo Yong (Aunt), Keye Luke (Elder Son), Roland Lui (Younger Son), Suzanne Kim (Little fool), Ching Wah Lee (Ching), Harold Huber (Cousin), Olaf Hyten (Grain merchant)

Adapted from a best-selling, Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Pearl S Buck (who grew up the child of missionaries in China), The Good Earth introduced to many Americans a view of Chinese life they’d never imagined. The story’s basic structure was probably familiar: a hard-working, noble peasant Wang Lung (Paul Muni) marries O-Lan (Luise Rainer), slave of the Great House. Through hard work he increases his farm on the ‘good earth’, before famine drives him to desperation. Refusing to sell their land, the family go to the city, get caught up in revolution but O-Lan lucks out in finding a bundle of jewels. Now rich and powerful, Wang Lung buys the great house – but, of course, in his newfound pride casts aside O-Lan for concubine Lotus (Tilly Losch) and quarrels with his now adult sons. Will a plague of locusts bring everyone together again?

You can’t really go far when talking about The Good Earth without addressing the rather loud elephant in the room. This is the most infamous yellow-face production in Hollywood history. It had originally been planned to find Chinese-American leads, but producer Irving Thalberg – to whom the film was dedicated – decided America ‘wasn’t ready’ for that. You kinda wish he’d tried harder, especially as clearly America was ready for a load of Chinese actors in the film as long as they weren’t in main roles. It’s more-and-more egregious as the film goes on, especially since Muni’s make-up job is awful and the likes of Connolly and Grapewin lead the way in making no effort to act or sound even remotely Chinese, instead feeling like they’ve just wandered in from New York.

This didn’t stop The Good Earth from receiving critical acclaim and nominations for several Oscars including Best Picture. It even won Luise Rainer her second (back-to-back!) Oscar. In this muted performance, Rainer’s quiet, sad-eyed, perpetually suffering O-Lan is called on to spend almost every scene with eyes cast down while suffering poverty, starvation, humiliation or half a dozen other things with stoic resignation. A more deserved Oscar went to Karl Freund’s impressive photography (including creating a locust plague from coffee grains in the wind).

You’d argue The Good Earth also deserved recognition for its recreation of China in the fields of California. Thalberg originally hoped to film on location in China, only to find Ching Ka-shek’s government was less than thrilled with the film unless they had complete creative control over it. Instead, the film flawlessly recreated Chinese wheat and rice fields in the Californian heat, as well as a lusciously built ‘Grand House’. You can argue that, like all the rest of the design aesthetic in The Good Earth – costumes, hair, orientalist music – it’s really a very Victorian pastiche rather than anything you could call China (the same goes for the film’s pussy-footing around questions of communist rebellion and revolt), but at least it looks great.

It’s a reminder the film means well. At heart it’s a grand, middle-brow, prestige epic, directed by competent safe-hands (Sidney Franklin went on to make a career producing films like this). It tells a family story over two generations full of nobility, suffering and sacrifice with a hero who, for all his Chinese heritage, basically happily embraces the American Dream. There are sudden time-jumps – Wang Lung and O-Lan’s children go suddenly from babies to children then even more suddenly young adults – with time vaguely marked by the flourishing of a tree planted by O-Lan on her wedding night.

Despite this grand scope, or perhaps because of it, The Good Earth can feel slow and ponderous, a little too pleased at its own literary self-importance. That isn’t to say there are not some fine sequences. Its depiction of famine is very well drawn, as plants wither and vultures circle over fallen calves. From the sad regret of Wang Lung about butchering his beloved ox (something he rather selfishly delegates to the long-suffering duteous O-Lan) to the family’s near lynching by a mob convinced that they must be hording food. These sequences are very effective, not least because it’s hard not to sympathise with the unjust reward of hunger and poverty for our heroes hard work.

The film’s finest sequence is in the big city, after a mass migration shot like a Western land grab. In the city, with its mass of humanity and grinding poverty, the film gets embraces Eisenstein inspiration as the city bubbles with revolutionary resentment. A speaker on the street is gunned down, leading into a fast cut riot, with one striking shot seeing a man crushed under an overturned cannon. O-Lan is swept up into a mob ransacking a house, trampled in a panic before nearly being executed by the military. There is a sense of physical peril here, of genuine stakes – as well as moral quandaries in times of desperation (Wang Lung ferociously beats his starving son for stealing from a market stall) missing elsewhere in the earlier more worthy sequences.

The Good Earth however leaves such drama and stakes behind for a more conventional Victorian melodrama as Wang Lung, corrupted by money, turns on all around him in favour of concubine Lotus (Anna May Wong furiously refused to play this role, outraged that the leading Chinese American actress, was being offered the only flat-out unsympathetic part). It’s all as you would expect: Wang Lung behaves badly, O-Lan suffers silently, the viewer watches disapprovingly. Muni’s performance slumps by this point – always an overblown actor, his early youthful enthusiasm transforms into an overblown, over-emphatic display that feels more and more like a Yank thrown into a Chinese farm.

The Good Earth rallies in its final sequence with a striking running battle with a locust invasion – impressively shot by Freund and arguably deserving of a visual effects nomination – before its sentimental ending. But sadly, there isn’t enough solid maintained quality in The Good Earth to make it easy to look past the yellowface today. In a sign of how times change, what on release was considered by Hollywood a major artistic statement, is today seen as a skin-crawling embarrassment best forgotten.