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Wednesday, April 3, 2019

DRAGON SEED (1944)

Big-ticket M-G-M item, from a Pearl Buck bestseller and running a prestige signifying two & a half hours, hits all the usual tropes of WWII small-town resistance stories. Act One sets up Happy Valley, doping out contented nuclear families & spotting envious gossips ripe for enemy picking. Act Two has the conquering army march in, dispatch holdouts and set the new order in place. Act Three brings partisans out of hiding, rising in righteous revenge in spite of long odds. Then, uplifting epilogue with noble sacrifice before cuing National Anthem and out. EDGE OF DARKNESS/’43 (Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, dir.-Lewis Milestone, and this film’s Walter Huston playing the same elder statesman role he takes here) is a fine example of the form. But, of course, we’re ignoring the wild card as DARKNESS was Norwegian while this film puts its all-Caucasian leads in YellowFace for a story of rural China brutally invaded by the Japanese. And the film’s not ineffective, with its starry cast ethnicized with minimal fuss to adjust the Caucasian eyelid crease. The practice must seem absurd to younger audiences (it certainly does to older ones!), especially with stars as well known, and personalities as ‘fixed’ as Katharine Hepburn. Here playing forthright rebel mother/cool mass murderer, a stretch in any makeup. Of the large cast, Aline MacMahon (a regular Mother Courage) & Hurd Hatfield (bloodthirsty #3 son) pull the trick off best. But these things have largely aged into curiosities.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, EDGE OF DARKNESS.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Easy to forget how mainstream this once was, one of the top grossing films of ‘44.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Look fast to see the Production Code ban on married couples sharing a bed dropped for Huston & MacMahon.  If they weren’t in YellowFace, it’d never have happened.

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