New Picture

Dragon Seed (M.G.M.) is a kind of slant-eyed North Star (TIME, Nov. 8). A two-and-a-half-hour picturization of Pearl Buck's best-selling novel (TIME, Jan. 26, 1942) about China at war. Often awkward and pretentious, it nevertheless has moments of moral and dramatic grandeur.

China is typified in a resolute old farmer named Ling Tan (Walter Huston). When war comes to Ling Tan's village, he does not choose to run. He meets the Japanese peaceably and with dignity--only to learn that dignity is no longer a human value. His son-in-law's fat old mother, his second son's wife, are raped and murdered. His three sons, and the wife (Katharine Hepburn) of one of them, join the refugees who, carrying parts of a dismantled factory on their backs, stream toward mountains a thousand miles distant.

Later Ling's children return, experienced guerrilla fighters. They teach the humane old man to kill. He becomes the leader of the underground, is betrayed to his soft merchant son-in-law (Akim Tamiroff), a collaborationist. Katharine Hepburn causes the death of the traitor and succeeds, in an inadvertently funny banquet scene, in poisoning most of the local Japanese command. At length Ling Tan learns his hardest lesson: for all his reverence for his soil and home, he must destroy both, since they are useful only to the enemy.

By one of Hollywood's curious conventions, the Japanese in this film are, as usual, played by Chinese while the Chinese are played by the Caucasians with their eyes painfully plastered in an Oriental oblique. The result suggests Dr. Fu Manchu and an epidemic of pinkeye.

But despite his studio pajamas and poetic prose, Walter Huston as Ling Tan nobly creates a character in whom the greatness of a whole people sometimes touches sublimity.

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