The Good Earth

Last week actress Luise Rainer died. She received respectful obituaries, but it can't be held against anyone if they'd never heard of her--except for a brief return in 1997, she hadn't made a movie in about 70 years. But Oscar geeks knew her well--she was the first performer to win back to back to Oscars, and was the longest lived Oscar winner--when she died last week she was 104 years old.

She won her first Oscar for The Great Ziegfeld in 1937, and wasn't the favorite to win the next year, for her role as a Chinese farmer's wife in The Good Earth. But win she did, and she would ever after feel like it was a curse rather than a blessing. She didn't like the roles that were offered her, and retired. She made three films in 1938, one in 1943, and then one in 1997.

As for The Good Earth, it's a fairly good film but one has to get past a huge obstacle: all the characters are Chinese, but most of the actors are European. It was considered to use Chinese actors (a few, such as Keye Luke, are used), and Irving Thalberg (this was the last film he shepherded as studio boss at MGM) thought it over and realized it wouldn't make financial success. There was a Chinese movie star, Anna May Wong, and she was considered for the role. But she couldn't play the part opposite Paul Muni (who played the farmer) because the Hays Code had anti-miscegenation rules. Therefore, even though Muni was playing a Chinese man, he couldn't be seen onscreen married to a Chinese actress. Idiocy.

The film was based on Pearl S. Buck's novel about hardship and success. The film begins with Muni taking Rainer for his bride, sight unseen. She's a kitchen slave in the "Great House," the lords of the village. Muni lives with his father (Charlie Grapewin) farming wheat, and every little thing impacts the harvest. Muni wants more, and buys more land, but a famine wipes everything out. The family heads south, where they live in abject poverty, but Muni does not sell his land.

They get caught up in the revolution, and Rainer, joining a band of looters in mansion, finds a bag of jewels. She's almost executed for stealing, but she and the family go back north and with the proceeds of selling the jewels, Muni becomes a very big man, even buying the house where Rainer was once a slave. But great wealth spoils him. He takes a second wife, a much younger woman, who seduces his younger son. It's only when everything he owns is threatened by a plague of locusts that he realizes that Rainer was the best woman he could have had.

If you can get over the general insult of white actors playing Chinese, this film holds up okay. There are some thrilling scenes, such as when Rainer is nearly trampled to death in the looting, or the locust finale, which has some fairly good special effects (along with close-ups of actual locusts munching on plants). Rainer's role, as befits a character who defers to her husband always, is subtle, and it's rather remarkable she did win again, since she doesn't have a chance for scenery chewing (the favorite that year was Greta Garbo in Camille, who gave one of the great death performances of all time). Rainer dies in The Good Earth, but very passively, as people usually die.

It was somewhat startling to think that a woman who had won an Oscar over 75 years ago was still alive. Winning an Oscar, if you're a woman, seems to be a boost for longevity: Olivia De Havilland is now the oldest Oscar-winner. She's 98.