The Good Earth (1937)

Nominated for Best Picture of 1937, The Good Earth is the story of a family of Chinese peasants and their struggles to survive and even flourish. It's based upon the prize-winning novel by Pearl S. Buck, and it tells a story of perseverance and hard work. This family faces drought, hunger, long migrations, political revolutions, a series of tests of their endurance. It's a relatively quiet film overall, a study in patience, with just two exceptions of note: a plague of locusts and a night of rioting during one of the revolutions in China.

The sequence involving the plague of locusts is pretty spectacular. The amount of effort it must have taken in 1937 is staggering to imagine. And the dozens of actors necessary to make the battle against these insects convincing? Well, these are the days long before CGI took care of crowds. The same holds true for the scenes of the revolution. Watching Luise Rainer being trampled as she tries to get her share of the treasures in the home of the wealthy landowners (a home where she once was a slave) is cringe-inducing in its suspense. Those are actual people tearing the structure down around her.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the most controversial aspect of this movie: its casting. The lead roles are played by European actors. Paul Muni, an Austrian, plays Wang Lung, the peasant farmer who learns to love the woman he has been arranged to marry (although with one significant misstep along the way, a woman named Lotus). Rainer, who was born in Germany, plays O-Lan, the servant girl who leaves the big house for a harsh life as the wife of a poor farmer. Only their sons are played by Asian actors, the best of them being Keye Luke as the older boy. He's very good; it's a shame that there was really no place in the industry at the time for him to achieve a career as a leading man. Understandably, Hollywood in those days didn't turn over leading parts to non-white actors, and while Muni and Rainer are both good, they are never truly convincing as Chinese peasants.

This was the last film that the "boy wonder" of MGM, Irving Thalberg, worked on. There's a tribute to him at the beginning of the film, and it's fitting that a big budget literary adaptation should be his final contribution to the industry.