During the Chinese civil war of the 1920s, Shanghai is in chaos. Bob, a missionary, is about to marry Megan, his childhood sweetheart whom he hasn't seen in three years. On her arrival in Shanghai, her rickshaw driver is hit and killed by the car of the warlord General Yen. Megan is upset that Yen seems unconcerned that he has caused a death (as in Casablanca, human life is apparently cheap) but for good or ill, they have made a brief connection. As the missionaries spout cruel comments about their charges, Bob decides to postpone the wedding briefly to go off and save some orphans. He goes to Yen to get a safe passage document, but Yen gives him a note which mocks him for leaving his bride-to-be. Bob and Megan get to the orphanage, but street battles separate them and an injured Megan is saved from further harm when she is taken onto the private train of General Yen. While recovering at his home, she sees a brutal mass execution carried out from her window even as she sees scenes of luxury in his palatial house. Megan has been reported dead so Yen decides to keep her around. She tries to sneak letters out to Bob, but Yen's mistress Mah-Li gives them to Yen instead. Yen says he will send her back to Shanghai once things have calmed down in the streets, but he engages in a slow burn seduction with Megan, and soon she is having erotic dreams of a suave and loving Yen saving her from a demonic Yen. But even as she begins to fall for him, she cannot convince him to show mercy to Mah-Li when it is discovered that she is the lover of one of Yen's henchmen, and has been feeding information to Yen's enemies. In the end, Megan agrees to stay with the isolated warlord and she dresses as a courtesan to serve him tea, but he has poisoned the tea, and after he dies, she says she will never leave him, and will see him again in the afterlife.
This early Frank Capra film is a footnote in movie history as the first film to play at Radio City Music Hall, but it still holds interest as an example of fine pre-Code moviemaking. The shimmering black & white photography is gorgeous, and though the sets may not be as elaborate as those at MGM (this was shot at Columbia, at the time not quite a grade-A studio), they are effective. Romance between races would soon be banned by the Production Code, and some critics believe that the portrayal of love between an Anglo woman and a Chinese man doomed the movie at the box office. Barbara Stanwyck is as fine as ever as Megan; the Danish actor Nils Asther dons what we would call "yellowface" to play Yen, but he plays his role with some subtlety and I don't think his performance is as jarring to modern viewers as those in the Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto movies. There are Asian actors in a handful of roles, including Toshir Mori as the complicated mistress. Walter Connelly plays an American money man who has raised a good deal of cash to finance Yen's ambitions, and Gavin Gordon is the unlikeable Bob. Given how interracial romance was treated through most of Hollywood’s classic era, the ending here in which Megan still pines for Yen after his death is almost shocking. [DVD]
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