China and the Chinese in Popular Film: From Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan by Jeffrey Richards

Author:Jeffrey Richards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2016-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Philip Ahn played an army captain and Richard Loo three small roles as farmer, rabble-rouser and peach-seller.

The historian Jonathan Spence says that, of all the fictional portraits of the Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s, ‘it was Pearl Buck’s Chinese peasants with their stoic dignity, their endurance, their innate realism, and their ceaseless battles with an unrelenting nature, who reached deepest into American hearts’.17 While the novel sold an estimated 1.5 million copies, an estimated 23 million Americans saw the film.18

Another epic film derived from a best-selling novel met with a rather different fate from The Good Earth. This is Warner Bros’ Oil for the Lamps of China (1935), based on the best-selling 1933 novel by Alice Tisdale Hobart. Directed by Mervyn Leroy and scripted by Laird Doyle it starred Pat O’Brien and Josephine Hutchinson. Like MGM, Warners sent a camera crew to China and also to Japan under director Robert Florey to shoot background footage. They returned with 20,000 feet of footage, little of which ended up in the film. Desert exteriors were actually shot in the Mojave Desert.

What is remarkable about the film is that it was produced by William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions for Warner release, for the original novel was an unsparing indictment of ruthless American corporate capitalism, of which Hearst was a prime example. Hollywood censor Joseph Breen picked up on the anti-corporate message and strongly advised consultation with Standard Oil and the Chinese Consul in Los Angeles.19When Hearst saw the completed film he was so upset by the anti-corporate message that he considered removing the Cosmopolitan name from it. But the studio mollified him by recalling the production to shoot additional scenes which would soften the message. Production chiefs Jack Warner and Hal Wallis also cut twenty-five minutes from the original two-hour running time. The result was the introduction of an opening scene which was essentially the mission statement of the fictional Atlantis Oil Company. A lecturer addresses a group of young company recruits heading for China. He tells them that they are going ‘to dispel the darkness of centuries by the light of a new era – oil for the lamps of China – American oil’. They will extend the frontier of civilisation and their ideas must be ‘new, progressive and American’, but they must also learn to think like the Chinese. He tells them the company always takes care of its own.

The irony of that final statement is abundantly demonstrated by the narrative which unfolds and centres on dedicated and idealistic company man Stephen Chase (Pat O’Brien) and his wife Hester (Josephine Hutchinson). At his first posting Stephen invents a new lamp allowing for economical use of kerosene by the Chinese but he is denied the credit for it. The boss whom he reveres is demoted by the company because he is old-fashioned and he commits suicide. Despite the fact that his wife is pregnant, Stephen is sent to manage a set of remote oil tanks. When they catch fire, he has to leave Hester to take charge of the fire-fighting and she loses the baby.

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