Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

jhkp I was crazy about this film! There were a few flaws (in my opinion), which I'll get to in a moment. But I found the film fascinating on a few levels. First, the heroine, Jade, is an amazing character. I can understand why MGM thought one of their own biggest stars, Katharine Hepburn, would excel in this role. Like Hepburn, she's a determined, headstrong, never-say-die type of character, who happens, also, to possess a good deal of feminine charm. After a minute or two, I wasn't very concerned about the fact that Hepburn was not Chinese. She was so very right, in temperament, for the role. It does take some time before the acceptance of Miss Hepburn as the character is total, but that does happen, a bit further down the line.Since this is a story of a woman character facing a brutal enemy in a war on her home turf, I'm surprised more people did not like it for that reason alone. (Since few war movies come at it from this angle - other than Gone With The Wind.) Moreover this is a very modern woman who resists the traditions of her upbringing and, because it needs to be done, leaves her village along with her husband and joins a band of resisters transporting heavy machinery across the country in the most grueling conditions - while she's pregnant! Though the film leaves it ambiguous as to whether these are Communists or Nationalists, one would be hard pressed not to be lost in admiration for their grit and guts. One day Jade decides she really needs to take a day or two off, as the baby is due, and proceeds to bear a healthy child who eventually is brought home by her in a large basket (the child having grown) she carries on her back.But this is not Jade's story, alone, it's much more of an ensemble piece about an entire family of farmers facing the invasion of the Japanese in the 1930's. Their various tribulations and joys are for the most part, grippingly and entertainingly depicted. The father and mother of this family (Jade's in-laws) are brilliantly played by Walter Huston and Aline McMahon. Turhan Bey, Henry Travers, Robert Bice, and Frances Rafferty also have major roles. A duplicitous character is played by Akim Tamiroff, his faithful wife by Jacqueline DeWit, and Travers' selfish wife by Agnes Moorehead. Hurd Hatfield plays the gentle, favored Third Son who becomes bloodthirsty and abhorrent to his parents.The film ranges very well from intimate human drama to spectacle and back again. The production design is really splendid, and the penultimate scenes of "scorched earth" are both heartbreaking and exhilarating. I marveled at what these people had to go through and how they faced it. It was truly grueling and incredible.As for Caucasian actors in Asian makeup. This is not a documentary. I believe the Chinese staged a production of Death Of A Salesman. And the Japanese had a very long-running stage production of Gone With The Wind. This particular film was a tribute by Americans to the spirit of another people, and I didn't find it inappropriate. Not that it works all the time, but overall it was carried off extremely well.As to the casting of Hepburn, someone said her New England accent was wrong for the part, but since, in real life, the characters would be speaking Chinese, not English, we're already suspending disbelief and her accent didn't bother me. She actually does an awesome job, and gets inside the role. There are few if any other white actresses of the time who would have been able to play the part at all. Hepburn not only plays it, but is excellent in it.Certain parts of the film are a little too broad, but these aren't frequent. Agnes Moorehead is very broad at first but she simmers down later and actually ends up being quite good. The marauding Japanese are played too broadly. The assault in the woods might have been even more effective if they had been played as grim and serious, rather than in a caricatured way, smiling, with clichéd comments, etc. In the book, this was a chilling scene. It's still effective in the film, but when a scene is horrific, it's not necessary to add a lot of "acting" to it. Frances Rafferty is great in the scene, by the way.Lionel Barrymore narrates the film and he has one of the most marvelous voices ever. His narration adds something significant to the film.When you have seen this motion picture you will feel like you have witnessed a truly human, emotional story, a piece of history, and it may leave you wondering about man's inhumanity to man, as it is one of the most unflinching films made during the war years. But it will give you hope and inspire you, as well.

ResoluteGrunt While trying hard not to be too condescending to Americans of today who somehow think the world was always as they now see it around them -- this movie was made in 1943, in the darkest midst of the horrific World War II, when America was engaged in a global struggle of epic proportions against the mighty Japanese Empire (and other very powerful allied nations all over the world), and when Manchuria, China and most of Asia were occupied by the very brutal Japanese invaders. The film was released to the public more than a year before that terrible war began to reach a conclusion.In 1944 America's victory in the Second World War was by no means assured, yet the US was trying to do whatever it could to assist the Chinese against the Japanese while the main US military forces fought the Japanese directly island by island westward across the Pacific. Of particular note is the fact that Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937, and that both suffered under merciless Japanese occupation for years before America formally entered the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Japanese forces committed brutal atrocities against Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in the Rape of Nanking, slaughtering as many as 300,000 civilians within a month. Before it was over more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved for slave labor and at least 2,700,000 Chinese died. Japanese occupation atrocities against the Chinese included mass killings by airborne gasses on hundreds of separate occasions.The film, which was being made while all this was going on, but before most of the details were fully known, therefore reflects the American (and western) thinking at the time, as depicted through the keen expert eyes of the great China observer, American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck. It also reflects what was available to Hollywood film-makers at that desperate moment. Given the time and the circumstances, the movie does quite an adequate job - all of which undoubtedly explains the involvement in it of the great American actress Katharine Hepburn. The film helped Americans at that time to understand China's desperate situation, why the Chinese were worth assisting, and why the US military, and most Americans at home, were trying hard to do just that at truly great cost. Hepburn's name on theater marquees also ensured that many more people would see the film than otherwise.Americans in 1944 didn't care one bit that the Chinese characters were being played by Americans; audiences could easily imagine, empathize and understand. Very many of them had already read Buck's novel with the same title, published in 1942, and knew that the famous author, who had written many novels about China, had been a very vocal proponent of American understanding and support of China in her struggle with the Japanese. Pearl S. Buck had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, mainly on the basis of her great China trilogy "The House Of Earth", including its first part, "The Good Earth".The Japanese surrendered unconditionally to the US on August 14, 1945, and Japanese troops in China formally surrendered to the Chinese a month later, but by then most of Manchuria and China had been destroyed. The people portrayed in the film had seen what the Japanese had done in Manchuria over the previous six years, and then experienced Japanese brutality directly for another eight years. The 14 years of China's monumental struggles in World War II were a pivotal point in China's history. Before the Japanese invasion, China had suffered nearly a century of humiliation at the hands of various imperialist powers and was relegated to a semi-colonial status. However, the war greatly enhanced China's resolve, strength and international status. After the war, the Republic of China became a founding member of the United Nations and a permanent member in the Security Council. China also reclaimed Manchuria.The movie therefore helps Americans today to understand a most critical moment in China's, and their own, common history, and why it all was, and remains, important.Old American Soldier

Neil Doyle It may be disconcerting to see blue-eyed Caucasian actors playing Orientals, but once this initial distraction is over, the story of DRAGON SEED takes over and it's an engrossing one. Film's chief flaw is the fact that Pearl Buck's story is overlong--and so is the film.Chinese villagers have to flee the enemy, Japanese soldiers, during the 1930s, and WALTER HUSTON and ALINE MacMAHON are the sturdy head of a family that includes daughter KATHARINE HEPBURN, as Jade. None of the three principals are particularly convincing in their Oriental make-up, but it's still fascinating to watch them perform.HURD HATFIELD, TURHAN BEY, AKIM TAMIROFF, JACQUELINE DeWIT and HENRY TRAVERS are further examples of offbeat casting, but the grim story of survival of the fittest under cruel exploitation by the enemy is well crafted and always interesting to follow.The film is photographed in meticulous B&W, crisply produced in the handsome MGM manner--with main attention going to Huston and MacMahon who do nicely in the leading roles. Hepburn, thankfully, is less mannered and less on display than usual. One of the most interesting scenes involves her decision to poison her brother-in-law during a banquet at his "mansion". Summing up: Admirers of other Pearl Buck works (like THE GOOD EARTH) should find this unusual drama well worth watching. MGM should be commended for producing a very tasteful version of the novel. Story ends on a fever pitch with a graphic simulation of "the scorched earth policy" as practiced by the Chinese villagers.

tjonasgreen This movie is just as terrible as you've always heard it is. But it has a few points of interest, especially for those who want to revisit the peculiar politics of the WWII era. At the same time that Japan was invading China, DRAGON SEED depicted the Japanese as ravening monsters while glamorizing the Chinese Communist guerrillas fighting them. War made for strange bedfellows and just a couple of years later, portraying Communists in a sympathetic light would have been a dangerous, career-killing thing to do.The film itself has all the production values one imagines MGM would bring to bear on a best-selling novel by Pearl Buck. And as a piece of wartime propaganda, every opportunity is taken to make the Japanese seem like inhuman monsters -- indeed, the way that violence (especially sexual violence) toward women is portrayed here is surprisingly harsh and lurid for this period, and would only have been considered acceptable because it demonized The Enemy during wartime.Criticizing old movies for being racially insensitive and politically incorrect is self-defeating. We are all products of our time and place. However regrettable it seems now, it was inconceivable in the Hollywood of 1944 that Asian actors would have been used in lead roles. And a few film critics and writers of the time criticized the film for this, finding it as ridiculous as we do. From our own vantage point it is always useful for us to revisit the mores of another time even when we are appalled by them so that we can see how far we've come. And how far we still need to go. We can't turn back the clock and redo the past, so instead of reviling it, let's learn from it.Is there entertainment value here? Sure, some, though in many ways this is a stilted pot-boiler and more of a political tract than a movie. And there is one good sequence, though it is as contrived and melodramatic as something in a bad silent film. Katharine Hepburn (giving one of the worst performances of her career) is holding poison that she hopes to use against her turncoat brother-in-law. Instead, she finds herself in the kitchen of his mansion where a banquet for the Japanese invading army is being prepared. While pretending to be a woman willing to barter her body to the Japanese, she looks for an opportunity to poison the feast. The tension and cross-cutting as the attempts and the reversals pile up is fun -- the only really memorable scene in this very phony picture. Aline McMahon got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and though she is the only one in DRAGON SEED who suggests a real, feeling human being, one imagines she would have given the same performance as a Russian, Greek or French peasant -- it is a generic 'ethnic' performance, and as full of baloney as everything else in this curious movie, so much a relic of it's time.