Barbara Stanwyck by Dan Callahan Read Free Book Online Page A

called her “the world’s best loser,” and that’s an apt description of Stanwyck’s persona here (in the forties, she might have been dubbed the world’s worst winner).
Forbidden
ends with Lulu walking alone down a street, her man dead, her life over, but her mood rather tranquil after all her upheavals.
    Capra later told his trusted sound man, Edward Bernds, that his next film with Stanwyck,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
(1933), “didn’t make money, but it has more real
movie
in it than any other I did.” He had reason to boast, for this is his most fluid, audacious, original work as a director. It’s the kind of movie even those who don’t like the Capra of
Mr. Deeds
and
Mr. Smith
can embrace, for he takes his often confused, touchy talent and applies it not to politics or social messages, but to sexual longings and fantasies, important subjects that suit his brand of impassioned, mixed-up emotionalism.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
cost a million dollars to make, and it was the first film to play Radio City Music Hall; scheduled for two weeks, it was pulled after eight days. Capra underestimated the engrained racism of an American 1930s audience, which couldn’t handlethe thought of a Chinese warlord making love to a white woman—let alone the sight of it on screen—even if General Yen (Nils Asther) was a suave, gay Swedish actor in yellowface.
    This is Capra’s best film with Stanwyck, the most unusual, and maybe the most personally revealing. “I accepted it, believed in it, loved it,” she said later. It begins with a map of China and some dissolves to Chinese natives running for their lives. Joseph Walker’s glistening cinematography lets us know that Capra has caught Josef Von Sternberg fever in his visuals, and he seems to want to piggyback on the success of Sternberg’s
Shanghai Express
(1932). These two films look alike and share a common background and technical filmic vocabulary, but their effect is as different as Stanwyck is from Marlene Dietrich—which is to say, as different as can be imagined.
    We cut to a wedding party with English missionaries, as the Chinese keep running outside the door. The contrast is unsettling. Capra himself could be racist, as shown in McBride’s book, but he was an unsettled racist, a “let’s say everything I think and work it out later” sort, and this has the effect of pleasingly destabilizing all the racial points in
General Yen
. If a director of today were to cut from Chinese peasants evacuating to an English missionary social event, the film would almost be obligated to hit us over the head with the point about English obliviousness. But because Capra comes to this scene from his less certain 1930s viewpoint, the missionaries are seen as three-dimensional people, misguided in the extreme, but human and interesting.
    At the party, Chinese men sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and a repressed, bespectacled girl says she can’t wait to see the betrothed couple kiss. (She gets sternly reprimanded.) An old man missionary who has spent fifty years in China tells a story about teaching the tale of Jesus’s crucifixion to Mongolian bandits, who listened to the details avidly. Later, he found out that the bandits crucified their next victims. “That, my friends, is China,” he says, and the camera whip pans to an older Chinese man, looking inscrutable. The actor playing this old missionary delivers his lines in the phony, portentous way of the deacon in
The Miracle Woman
, so it’s clear that Capra is not at all on his side, even as his crucifixion story makes an uncomfortable impression.
    We’ve been told at the party that Stanwyck’s Megan Davis, the bride-to-be, is from an old Puritan family and that her father is a publisher. By this point, Capra knows that Stanwyck’s range has widened and that she can play different kinds of women, women