On The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Capra, 1933)

Had the chance to see this at Film Forum. Was immediately taken with Barbara Stanwyck. She's like the original Greta Gerwig!

Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), set in Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War, features Barbara Stanwyck as an American missionary’s fiancée who develops a psychosexual interest in General Yen, played by Nils Asther in yellowface. General Yen, too, is fascinated with Stanwyck’s character Megan and holds her hostage at his estate. The film is not a romance in the usual sense of the word; rather, Yen waits patiently for his hostage to capitulate and accept her capture, while Megan fights against the anxiously erotic feelings she has for this strange, baroque man. After an intense sex dream, Megan decides to give in to Yen, but it is too late — the general has poisoned himself because of his unrequited love. While other films may portray the female figure as a damsel in distress against a foreign Other, no white man comes to save Megan and preserve her white purity. The film is less an action narrative in which Megan is to be saved than a horror film about interracial desire. While the configuration of the General Yen character as a godless heathen yet elegant mandarin is undoubtedly racist, it is canny casting: for what is General Yen but an erotic fiction of a white woman’s imagination in the first place? Orientalism is a way to read and author text into being. The text does not produce itself. The character is so ridiculous, and so intertwined with Megan’s own sexual self, that he does not really exist at all, but is a mirror or projection, a phantasm. Asther’s performance is not that of an Oriental mad villain, but an impression of the white imagination. The on-screen prohibition of sexual contact between actors of different races belies a thematic fascination with miscegenation.