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I caught The Good Earth on TCM last night and enjoyed it. I'd read this book a few months earlier with a phony dust cover to hide the huge Oprah book club stamp. I've read some contemporary criticism of it that derides the source material's cultural imperialism, or whatever academic sounding wiener words eggheads use to express self-hatred. But the novel--and to a lesser extent, the movie--are quite empathetic and forward-thinking for the Charlie Chan era. Whereas the novel is primarily concerned with the land itself as giver of life etc, the film adaptation of The Good Earth is focused mostly on the woman. O-Lan (Luise Rainer) is the pliant, self-sacrificing wife of Wing Lung (Paul Muni), a peasant farmer in rural China in the late 19th century. They, their children and other hangers-on have to deal with a myriad of problems that seem quaint to modern Western audiences--you know, things like droughts, roving bandits, starvation, and infanticide. Through the various trials and tribulations, the family is largely kept whole through O-Lan's quiet servitude. In one scene, she delivers a baby and almost immediately afterwards returns to the fields. There's a feminist undercurrent to a baby-birthin' slave character that makes the modern permutation of it seem particularly frivolous. It's pretty distracting to watch white actors play Asian by taping their eyes back--Muni specifically looks about as Chinese as an Eastern European Jew. Rainer is a little better. I believe she may have pioneered the "glamourous starlet dresses down" archetype that won Charlize Theron a Golden Boner statuette all those years later. I also couldn't get past her distinct German accent, but she was nonetheless a treat to watch. I had never even heard of her before yesterday, but apparently she won two Oscars in the 30s and promptly thereafter disappeared. If only Julia Roberts would follow her lead. America apparently wasn't ready for an all-Asian cast in the 30s, and based on the success of Slumdog Millionaire, even today reinforces the orthodox of minority as novelty. There is one spectacular scene near the end of the movie where the acreage is threatened by a swarm of locusts. Director Sidney Franklin accomplished with a backdrop and a few buckets of grasshoppers what most modern studios can't with a nine-figure effects budget. The sight of a tornado of bugs cresting over the hill was more monstrous and foreboding than Mickey Rourke's face. Were they to do a remake, this scene would likely be green-screened and left to the computer animators at ILM. The Good Earth is a decent story of overcoming the odds through hard work, sacrifice and a little luck. A few parts drag, and Muni's character is morally capricious and unlikable at times. As previously stated, the actors in yellowface can be a bit distracting, but like Huck Finn, Song of the South, and Bugs Nips the Nips, these outmoded racial attitudes constitute a historical record that is to be preserved, studied and upheld. For as Confucius once say, "The object of the superior Honky is truth." I'll give it a four.
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Jan 13, 2011 16:54
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