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Kristina 2022-01-26 08:43:38

Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, published in 1931, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and was the best seller for both years. [1] So, MGM's gold medal producer Irving Thalberg wanted to make an epic masterpiece based on the novel. It is said that Louis B. Mayer was not optimistic about the potential of the film at first, saying, "Who would want to see a film about Chinese peasants?"[2]
Thalberg eventually persuaded Mayer to get a budget of $2.8 million, It took three years to shoot The Good Earth. Pearl Buck hoped that all the characters in the film would be played by Chinese or Chinese Americans, but MGM ended up using a group of veteran stars, Paul Muni who played Wang Lung and Luis Rainer who played Alan, who were the winners of the 1936 Oscar for male and female roles, respectively. , Paul Muni is The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Luis Rainer is The Greatest Ziegfeld (1936).
"I'm in business of creating illusions." Thalberg said in response to a question about using American actors.
Someone once suggested that Anna May Huang play the role of Alan, but the anti-intermarriage regulations in Hays Code did not allow Paul Muni's wife in the play to be played by a non-white man. Later, MGM wanted Anna May Huang to play the lotus, but she categorically refused, "I With Chinese blood on my body, you let me play the only villain in a movie where all Americans play Chinese.”[3]
In Hollywood at the time, Rainer was a loner, often appearing in public without makeup and in slacks. As a critic of the film industry, she considers herself first and foremost a pure stage actor, and therefore has no interest in fame itself. After being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Good Earth, Rainer made a statement to Society members that she would not attend the ceremony unless she was guaranteed an award. Rainer stayed at home that night, and a distraught Louis B. Mayer sent MGM staff to her house, only to find her in her pajamas and curlers on her head. She was asked to put on a formal suit immediately, then was taken to the Oscars dinner, which ended up taking that year's Best Actress award.
Regarding the filming location, MGM wanted to shoot in China, but the Nanjing Nationalist government had two groups of opinions. The opposition was out of dissatisfaction with the novel’s description of China’s backwardness, and the support was because the filming in China could be regulated by the government. In the end, Jiang Gong came forward and allowed filming in China, on the condition that the charming rural scenery of China was shown, and the filming process was supervised by the Chinese government, and the conditions that the actors must be Chinese were not realized. Most of the original footage disappeared mysteriously on a ship back to the United States, and a five-hundred-acre farm in the Chatsworth area of ​​Los Angeles had to be converted into a rural Chinese landscape to make up for the missing footage.
Thalberg died in September 1936, just a few months before the film was finished. While he never puts his name on the credits saying "credit you give yourself is not worth having," Louis B. Mayer opens the film with a tribute to him, "To the memory of Irving Grant Thalberg. We dedicate this picture, his last great achievement.”
In the same year, the Society added a new honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, for "Creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture produc-tion."

[1] http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Earth
[2] http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/27609%7C0/The-Good-Earth.html
[3] http://www.asiaarts.ucla. edu/article.asp?parentid=6132

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Extended Reading
  • Monica 2022-01-26 08:43:38

    8/10. Pearl is the heroine's simplicity and tolerance. The romantic technique of picking up peach pits on the roadside and burying them in a small courtyard symbolizes the close connection between the earth and destiny. Therefore, I will never sell the land when I meet the land master and teach the children how to beg for food. The master alienates his relatives and friends from the land, and he thinks that the revolution is eating/robbing the rich and the mob executed by the soldiers is ignorant and distressed. Relying on his son's Western knowledge to resist the locust plague (a metaphor for Japan's invasion of China) is full of Western superiority.

  • Mossie 2022-04-20 09:02:32

    Thanks to Pearl Buck's original work, the film's depiction of China can be said to be unparalleled. The film is full of the golden age of Hollywood, and the photography is extremely magnificent. The naturalism and poeticism are extremely perfect. In the middle, the surging feeling of the wind blowing the wheat waves really caught the wind. The escaping process, which is edited using rear projection and medium shot close-ups, is also very infectious. The train scene in this paragraph should be a clip shot in China, which is completely different from the studio scene in "Shanghai Express" shot a few years ago. . The scene of grabbing something and a close-up montage is mixed. The panoramic symmetrical shot opens and ends at the upper left angle. It is perfect. If modernism is applied to this paragraph, it can be completely understood that it is the imagination of the heroine when she is dying. The title "Earth" in the text is the most important core. It is a rare picture of the lifeblood of Chinese farmers. At the end, the earth is equated with his wife, realizing the traditional Hollywood-style love reunion routine. There is basically no choice in terms of acting skills. The body language of the male and female protagonists shows their skills.

The Good Earth quotes

  • Wang Lung: Where are all these soldiers going ?

    Unidentified laborer: They say there's a revolution coming.

    Wang Lung: Revolution ? What is revolution ?

    Unidentified laborer: I don't know but it has something to do with food.

  • [first lines]

    Wang Lung: This is the day.