Is all romance a Shavian phenomenon? It’s interesting that
Shaw never consummated his marriage since he seems to know so much
about the mysterious compromise between instinct and consciousness that
makes for the cocktail of romantic love. Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen inaugurated the Barbara Stanwyck retrospective at Film Forum and seeing it you sometimes think you're watching Major Barbara.
Megan Davis (Stanwyck) may not be a Salvation Army cadet, but she sounds like
Major Barbara in her zeal to change the world and General Yen (Nils Asther)
could be the resident spokesman for realpolitik, Untershaft. Edward Paramore’s script is
rife with Shavianisms. “Isn’t it better to shoot them quickly than to let them
starve slowly,” Yen tells the idealistic Davis as she looks out of her boudoir
at the firing squad. And later he says “I’m going to convert a missionary.” But
the movie is more complex than that. Underneath his realist veneer, Yen is
the true romantic willing to give up everything for love. Yen also has a bit of
the pre-Socratic in him, when he declaims, “we never really die, we only change”
and “life, even at its best, is hardly endurable.” There’s a dream sequence in the
film which competes with what Dali created for Hitchcock in Spellbound, as the man Megan despises
comes to her in both as a devil and a God. Within the context of the film’s
ideological conundrums the view of colonialism is actually more sophisticated
than you’ll find in a more modern treatment of the theme, say in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. Capra makes it clear
that the Western drive to civilize the hordes of Chinese is only a superficial
humanism predicated on a total inability to understand the complexities of the
culture. The Bitter Tea of General Yen could be taught in one of those courses which
deals with the failure to import Western style democracy to either the Far or
Middle East or to put it another way Edward Said’s Orientalism is what Barbara
Stanwyck’s character is suffering from. But the real subject of Film Forum’s
festival is Stanwyck and in the final scene in the love crypt, replete with its
Wagnerian potion, she is dazzling and enigmatic both, entering in her
bejeweled gown and offering herself up to a love that can never be.
Monday, December 9, 2013
The Bitter Tea of General Yen Inaugurates Stanwyck Retrospective at Film Forum
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