THE filming of Pearl Buck’s novel, “Dragon Seed,” follows a familiar path in occupied-nations films; starting with a good, peaceful folk—those of Nanking, but mainly farmer Ling Tan’s family—being subjugated by the Japanese, their learning the nature of the war, the enemy, and their own Quislings, and ending with their guerilla tactics against the enemy. It is full of the right kind of war thought for a brotherhood of nations. Also it is less innocent than most movies about the consequences of war, when its hero finds he cannot kill, nor stomach the fact that so many of his people are becoming as bloodthirsty as the enemy. All of this would be significant, even at this late date, if it came out the kind of life you can generally believe or find in any newsreel shot from Occupied China. Still as a romantic, syrupy picture of China today, I think you will find it more human and effective than many other romantic Hollywood films.
“Dragon Seed” misses creating an intrinsic Chinese existence and people, as well as a convincing Japanese, by as thorough a mile as a nation’s character can be missed by a movie, even by one that is spending two million dollars to be accurate. Visually, everything about it is too beautiful and plush. The farming lands of Ling Tan and his neighbors are as idyllic as an Italian landscape in a Renaissance painting, and are made more so by giving the film a golden sheen by shooting it in sepia: the whole effect achieves the splendid, rarified atmosphere of a fairy land rather than of farm land. Even the real Chinese adults who are used as extras to stream across Ling Tan’s land carrying factories inland or as Japanese soldiers, and the real Chinese children, are combed and curried to such a fine state that they look no less glamorous, or no more like homemade Chinese, than the main people—Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Aline MacMahon. The sentiment of too many of the events tends toward a similar kind of romantic overstatement: the Japanese officer who is about to rape the young Chinese mother is given a set of those practical-joker’s teeth to make him too obviously ape-like; the girl in turn is several steps too prettily dainty; the earth-scorching at the end is done with an arsonist’s relish and with enough fire to burn the city of Chicago; Jade’s and Lao Er’s lovemaking is on the level of newspaper poetry in its stylized winsomeness and plitty-Chinee qualities; Jade’s poisoning of the Japanese officers is glamorized to an unreal point. On the sound track is every possible kind of accent, including Akim Tamiroff’s borscht tones saying gowernmunt for government, a starched dialogue full of wisdom and about as human as cork, and refined, pretty tunes and marching songs that have their roots in Tin Pan Alley and the Almanac Singers.
“Dragon Seed” still ends up weighing substantially more than is common for a Hollywood epic, having a more compact, definite form and a few things that are very warm and human. For one thing, it covers more existence in less time than usual, getting a variety of feelings, problems and philosophies, from that of the third son (Hurd Hatfield), who turns from a sensitive, faint-hearted youth to a butchering guerrilla, to that of the third cousin (Henry Travers), who is the ineffectual scholar and doesn’t turn into anything. And it does this without the tedium produced by too little cutting, or the heavy flow of sentiment you get in a picture like Selznick’s “Since You Went Away.” Some of the most domestic parts of the film are done very accurately. The love of the mother (Aline MacMahon) for the other members of the family has enough greed and domination mixed in its fierceness to produce the right insidiousness, while still seeming like a generous kind of love. The relationship between her and the old farmer is lusty enough for all of its ideal prettiness, and the children and babies in the film are grasped, fondled and bounced with a genuine love. The rest of the humanity is contributed by the acting.
Walter Huston’s Ling Tan is the one character who seems visually without any kind of artificiality or trace of Hollywood. The role is one of the most common war-movie characters, the good peaceful man who is bewildered and sickened by the war and struggles to understand it. But it is played here probably better than it ever has been before, with a believable amount of pain, puzzlement and goodness. Miss MacMahon’s mother has a lot of mother in it, even if it seems grown in Brooklyn rather than the Orient. Miss Hepburn is like a well bred New England razor blade, but strikes many feelings off in a clear, brilliant way. Her mate (Turhan Bey) has a loping walk, the manner of a pampered American college boy, and the misfortune, with Hepburn, to be looked at consistently through the eyes of a director or photographer who should be making Christmas cards.
August 7, 1944