Top brass and a bevvie!

At long last, after years of waiting, a moment of sweet delight. Thank you Emma!

I don’t know what expectations that opening sentence inspired, but I doubt that you would guess that the ‘moment of sweet delight’ was when I finally got to see again ‘The Bitter Tea of General Yen.’

I waited until I had the flat entirely to myself; made myself a cup of tea, accompanied it with some sort of foreign (and delicious) marzipan confection and settled myself down for an extended period of indulgence.

‘The Bitter Tea of General Yen’ is a 1933 Frank Capra movie with a glamorous (!) Barbara Stanwyck playing the future wife of a missionary (!!) arriving in a chaotic China and being saved/abducted by a sophisticated and elegant Chinese warlord played by Nils Asther.

For 1933 this was an adventurous and courageous film. Emma (who very kindly copied the film for me as I have been going on about trying to see it for so long) commented that the film was ‘bizarre’ and that ‘the ending offers no easy answers.’

The basic storyline is fairly simple but what is truly interesting is the portrayal of miscegenation as the sexual relationship develops between the two main characters. What intrigued me about the film when I first saw it was a dream sequence which is shockingly and erotically revealing.

From her fantasy of an oriental bedroom Barbara Stanwyck has watched the local Chinese soldiers engage in amours. She has noted their rustic lovemaking with indulgent condescension then she falls asleep in a peacock wicker chair which forms a stern pattern of interlocking lines around her head.

As she sleeps she dreams and in her dream she imagines the warlord brutally breaking into her bedroom. In her dream imagination the warlord is a grotesque caricature of the punctiliously polite and immaculately dressed general and instead is portrayed vampire-like with long fingernails and sharp teeth.

As his hands grope towards her breasts she is suddenly saved by a masked hero. She melts into his arms and with a look of adoration and desire takes off the mask - to reveal the hero is actually the warlord!

She is both excited and repelled by her growing involvement with this character but she eventually finds that her defences against him are mere words and General Yen is able to force her to see that her beliefs as they are tested are not what she previously thought and that she and the General are more alike than they are different.

The final sequence of Stanwyck and Asther is powerful, poignant and ravishingly photographed. The final sequence of the film which features a silent Stanwyck and a drunken monologue from the worldly wise and cynical financial advisor to the General poses questions and possibilities that focus the audience’s attention on the final shot of the film – the strikingly beautiful three quarter profile (shot in soft focus) of Stanwyck herself.

God knows there are faults in the film, but this is not the Comfortable Capra of later years: this film is edgy and unsettling and a thoroughly good piece of work.

If you find it, or see it advertised on the TV watch it!

Only fitfully fine weather today; it is as if Catalonia is preparing me for the rigours of next Friday and a journey into the icy wastes of the UK.

Given my rate of preparation, I should begin to pack today with the hope that I might be ready before take off!

Some hope!