The Good Earth **** (1937, Luise Rainer, Paul Muni, Walter Connolly, Tilly Losch, Jessie Ralph) – Classic Movie Review 2025

Director Sidney Franklin’s famous 1937 epic drama scored Luise Rainer her second Best Actress Oscar (after the previous year’s The Great Ziegfeld) and she and Paul Muni earned much deserved praise for their roles as a Chinese peasant couple destroyed by greed in an inspiring story of humility and bravery.

Rainer triumphed as the first person to win back-to-back Academy Awards. She died on Tuesday 30 December 2014 of pneumonia at the grand old age of 104. Only four other actors have since match this feat.

Though they don’t look or sound Chinese, the acting of Rainer and Muni is still effective and moving in a heartfelt, affecting movie. It’s a big technical achievement for the time, and MGM’s special effects department (under Arnold Gillespie) produced magic special visual effects tricks that include a storm and plague of locusts.

Muni plays Wang Lung, a farmer in China, whose father gives him freed slave O-Lan (Rainer) as a wife. They manage to enlarge their property through hard work and careful management but a famine forces them off their land to live in the town, a dark cloud that proves to have a silver lining.

The MGM studio’s version of Pearl S Buck’s novel is a lavish, impressive affair, with big production values but starting from a lucid screenplay by Talbot Jennings, Tess Slesinger and Claudine West. The film is very old and has faded but it can still get to patient audiences. Karl Freund’s sepia cinematography was also honoured with an Oscar.

The film co-stars Tilly Losch, Charley Grapewin, Jessie Ralph, Soo Yung, Keye Luke, Roland Lui, Harold Huber, Olaf Hytten, William Law, Mary Wong, Charles Middleton, Chester Gan, Philip Ahn and Richard Loo.

The movie is dedicated to its producer Irving Thalberg, who died just before it was completed. He never took a screen credit during his career and Albert Lewin is the credited producer. Bernard Hyman took over from Thalberg. The original director George Hill shot Chinese location footage but committed suicide in 1934. The lavish, very costly film was three years in the making and failed to make its money back. Victor Fleming, Gustav Machatý and Sam Wood also worked uncredited on the direction.

Buck and Thalberg intended the film to be cast with all Chinese or Chinese-American actors, but MGM thought American audiences of the day were not ready for such a film. So many of the characters are played by Western actors made to look Asian with aid of make-up techniques developed by Jack Dawn and used for the first time in this film. However, some of the supporting cast are Chinese-American actors.

Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, Rainer ended her brief glorious Hollywood film career with Hostages in 1943 and then spent most of her life in England. She made the occasional film and TV appearances, including a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. Her last film role is the 1997 Fyodor Dostoyevsky adaptation The Gambler.

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