The Good Earth Reviews

Grandiose and perhaps too slavishly faithful to Pearl S. Buck’s novel, The Good Earth is a bit of an overstuffed drag. Wunderkind Irving Thalberg’s last film before his premature death, it’s yet another super-production more concerned with spectacle and initial impact than anything concerning art.

The plot follows the novel’s various detours and big set-pieces very faithfully, which is a problem. Buck’s novel presents a simplistic group of characters who don’t evolve or grow much, or are frequently lost track of for long periods of time before being reintroduced at random points. Her viewpoint was also clearly that of a white Christian bringing about salvation and modernity to the “backwards” Chinese, and they’re too often presented with child-like simplicity.

The worst offender of this is Paul Muni’s Wang Lung. Muni never disappears as effortlessly as he did in Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. He overacts too often, and adopts an accent that I suppose is his best effort at Chinese, but it just sounds distractingly "off." Good thing he’s the main character with the most speaking lines. And Luise Rainer’s mostly silent O-Lan is certainly a better performance than the previous year’s hammy Best Actress turn, but her win here is odd. She’s solid, if nothing more. She’s mostly called on to suffer nobly, and the harder edges of her character have been sanded off. Her work is commendable, maybe even worthy of the nomination, but it’s not as good as Greta Garbo’s immaculate work in Camille.

The rest of the cast is filled out with white actors in yellowface, just like the leads. While Muni and Rainer aren’t familiar faces or voices as hard-set star personas, the supporting players were recognizable character actors at the time. Many of them sound like grizzled prospectors and not the poor Chinese peasants they’re supposed to be playing. This was to be expected of the era, sadly, but it becomes more egregious and ugly once you notice that all of the extras and bit players are played by Asians.

There are two solid reasons to watch The Good Earth, and they’re the big production scenes and the cinematography. Karl Freund’s cinematography is a highlight of any film bearing his name, and his work is similarly solid and commendable. I would have thrown him a statute for his work in Metropolis, Dracula, Camille, or Key Largo before this one, but his win here is still well deserved.

The Good Earth brings to life many of the memorable scenes from the book – the plague of locusts, the revolution and rioting, the vast scenes of drought and starvation. These segments are thrilling moments in which the film springs alive, shaking off the tendency towards tasteful suffering and turgid movie-making. O-Lan’s near-miss with a firing squad is one of the few scenes of high-tension.

Far too much of The Good Earth is wasted on making a large-scale epic, without bothering to populate it with memorable characters. There’s too many long-stretches of tedium setting in, or Muni mugging for the back row, or Rainer's open-mouthed bowing and looking vaguely distressed. The big scenes show where all of the time and money went on the screen, shame they couldn’t put that kind of care into the rest of the production.