DRAGON SEED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 338, 14 December 1945, Page 19

DRAGON SEED

(M-G-M)

N the past few weeks we seem to have been subjected to some prodigiously long pictures. When they are as good as Wilson and A Tree Grows

in Brooklyn I am prepared to face with equanimity the risk of missing my last bus home, but I wish somebody had lopped the last few thousand’ feet off the M-G-M dragon’s tail as it wriggled its weary way across the screen. This film began about 8.30 and ended about 11 o'clock, and the only thing that would have made it more of an endurance test would have been if it had, in true Chinese fashion, started at the end and worked backwards. The temptation to be frivolous about Dragon Seed is strong. How can one treet very seriously the sight of Katharine Hepburn, with her eyes stretched slantwise and wearing oriental pyjamas, polishing off a bunch of Japanese generals and Chinese collaborators by putting poison in their soup? Is there not something at any rate unconsciously funny about Miss Hepburn, still speaking with the accents of Philadelphia Story, announcing the glad news to her "Chinese" spouse that the is about to become an ancestor? And so on almost right through the piece: except on a few occasions when Walter Huston (as old Ling Tan) rises by the sheer force of his acting above the limitations of his nationality and the script, the "Chinese" characters never suggest that they are anything ex. cept well-known and well-fed Hollywood stars pretending to be starving, desperate coolies. The "Japanese" characters are perhaps a trifle more realistic (physically, anyway) because, following Hollywood custom, they are portrayed by Chinese

actors! Yet even here the effect is searcely convincing. Nor is the dialogue -a weird variety of pidgin-American, plentifully sprinkled with such colourful phrases as "Oh, old man," "Come, my son," "You old woman," and "I have eaten enough foolishness in this house." And yet, though the urge to levity is strong it must be resisted. For, after all, the subject-matter of Dragon Seed is the opposite of frivolous. This film, for ali its dismal faults, is an earnest, wellmeant attempt to put Pearl Buck’s novel of war-torn China on the screen, and to pay a tribute to China’s patient millions; and there is nothing funny about the events it depicts-the rape of the good Chinese earth by the Japanese, the rape of the women, the slaughter of innécent peasants, the reprisals that follow when the Chinese organise themselves as glerria fighters, culminating in the decision to scorch the earth in front of the invaders. Some of the incidents, in spite of the drawbacks mentioned, are dramatic and exciting enough; but some of them, including the scenes showing the Indusco groups carrying their factories on their backs into the interior, fail because the director gllows his passion for artificial, painted backgrounds to run away with him. It would be interesting to see The Good Earth and compare it with this film. Did Luise Rainer give a more expert performance than Katharine ,Hepburn, and was that a more convincing Hollywood attempt than this to put the Chinese way of life on the screen? I suspect she did and that it was; but I suspect also that in the meantime we have grown a little more critical and exacting in our standards. And that is by no means a bad sign.