The Good Earth

The Good Earth (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). When Pearl Buck's novel The Good Earth appeared in 1931, it was at once acclaimed as the superlative word-picture of China. When Hollywood started to produce The Good Earth in 1933, it set out to make its picture equally superlative. Twenty writers, including Tess Slesinger, Marc Connelly, Talbot Jennings and Claudine West tried their band at adapting the stage version written by Owen and Donald Davis. Director George Hill went to China, returned with a boatload of authentic properties, presently committed suicide. Victor Fleming took the helm, quit with malaria. Sidney Franklin finished the job. Meanwhile the presiding genius, Irving Thalberg, died, left Al Lewin the production problems. Near Chatsworth, Calif., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rented 500 acres, carved a replica of a Chinese landscape complete with Great Wall.* Real farms were planted, a real water buffalo imported to turn the imported water wheels. A year and five months were spent shooting 5,500 extras. In China Good Earth cameramen ran through 100,000 ft. of film, in the U. S. 250,000. Only 14,000 are used in the final product. Total cost was reported as $2,500,000. Two more superlatives: Paul Muni's nine separate makeups took two and one-half hours a day to apply; Luise Rainer wore the cheapest wardrobe ever used by a Hollywood leading lady. Cost: $1.89.

After so much Hollywood hubbub it was logical to suppose that The Good Earth would turn out as chaotic as its preparation and as superficial as the novel was deep. Instead, it emerged as a real cinema epic, faithful in spirit, plot and acting to its forebear, sure to rank as one of the great pictures of all time.

The Good Earth's theme is the love of the Chinese peasant for his land and his dependence upon it. Most of its major scenes are plucked straight from the novel. On his wedding day, Wang Lung (Paul Muni), son of a poor farmer (Charles Grapewin), goes to the Great House to wed the bride that has been chosen for him. She is Olan (Luise Rainer), a meek, silent slave whose outward role is abnegation but whose soul is resolute. She is the pivot on which the picture turns. Hardly changing a facial muscle, in the two and a quarter hours The Good Earth runs, Actress Rainer manages to make her every thought and action as clear as crystal. Silently she fosters Wang's yearning for more land, shields him from his sycophant uncle (Walter Connolly). In one of the screen's most authentic thunder storms she rushes forth to help save the wheat, stops to bear her first man-child alone. When the famine comes, she cooks mud for her three children, silently kills her friend the water buffalo when Wang cannot make himself do it. When he would sell his land for a pittance, she prevents it, leads the family in a great trek to the city in the south.

There in a squalid hovel of mats she teaches her children to beg, goes out alone in the midst of rioting to help loot a rich merchant's house. Though trampled and nearly shot, she gets away with a pouch of jewels. She gives them to Wang, keeping only two pearls--"not to wear--I am too plain--but to look at when I am alone."

Wang the farmer now becomes the patrician head of the House of Lung. He returns to the country. He buys the Great House. He cuts off his queue in the western fashion. He dons silk. He forgets the land in his passion for Lotus (Tilly Losch), a sing-song girl whom he makes his second wife. To her he gives 0-lan's two pearls.

Then, for a smashing finale, the script forsakes Pearl Buck for the first time to invent a spectacular locust plague. In what is the cinema's first investigation of what may prove a fertile field for drama--the War against the Insect--Wang and his men. ankle deep in bugs, battle with fire, clubs and feet the swarm which drones down the valley, blackening the sky. Some of these incredible scenes were shot in China; others, showing close-ups of locusts feeding, were shot during a grasshopper plague in Utah with a microscopic lens attached to a camera. Finally the wind comes, blowing the locusts back up the valley. Back to the sing-song house goes Lotus. Back to the land goes Wang. Back to Olan, just in time, go the pearls.

*Now the basis for a Chatsworth real-estate boom.

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