Rent The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)

An Acquired Taste - The Bitter Tea of General Yen review by griggs

Frank Capra in full pre-Code fever dream mode, and it shows. The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a strange film — part colonial fantasy, part swooning romance, part opium-haze melodrama — and it earns its oddness.

Stanwyck is magnetic, all contained intensity and flickering desire, while Joseph Walker’s cinematography gives the film a dreamlike pull that helps explain its seductive power. Nils Asther’s yellowface casting as Yen is impossible to ignore, and it keeps the film at a cool distance from its own romantic fantasy. The central relationship works largely because Stanwyck commits to it so fully, and partly in spite of what the film can’t overcome.

Even so, Capra treats interracial desire seriously enough that the UK banned it outright — remarkable for a Hollywood studio picture in 1933. Bitter tea, then: an acquired taste, but worth sipping.

Precode Exotica (spoilers). - The Bitter Tea of General Yen review by Steve

This untypical Frank Capra romance starts in the Chinese Civil War but soon becomes an unrequited love story between an American missionary in Shanghai (Barbara Stanwyck), and a Chinese feudal warlord (Nils Asther). This is an unusually lavish and beautiful production, epic in the early scenes of conflict, and then opulent at the palace.

 The missionary is saved from the chaos of the war by the powerful general. It's a vicarious adventure, as the horrified outsider becomes seduced by the brutal but sensual oriental. As she falls under his influence, she sees him less as an archetype and becomes absorbed by his eroticism.

She fits a common pattern for Americans abroad in cinema: evangelist, naive, hubristic and out of her depth. In trying to save his soul she destroys him utterly even while she falls in love with the man and his aristocratic luxury. He takes poison while she returns home merely chastened by her experience, a more sophisticated woman.  

This is a classic of the pre-code era. After 1934, even implying an affair between people of different races would be forbidden, as would the suicide. It's an imaginative and complex film. There is undeniably plenty of racial stereotyping, but actually by the fade out it is the American's intrusive Christianity which seems the more inexplicable, eccentric philosophy.