The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Columbia). A sweet and intelligent young woman whose forbears are New England puritans arrives in Shanghai from the U. S. to marry a handsome and fiery missionary. Two accidents occur. The young lady sees her rickshaw boy brutally run down by a Chinese brigand-general; her marriage ceremony is delayed because the missionary has to rescue six children from an orphanage in besieged Chapei. During the rescue, the young woman is kidnapped by the brigand-general who ran over the coolie. General Yen (Nils Asther) whisks Megan Davis to his summer palace, dresses her in pajamas, holds a mass execution of prisoners-of-war under her bedroom window and makes advances toward her with pagan persistence.
No cinemaddict who has ever heard of Tsar Will Hays should be prepared to guess the outcome of this situation. Megan Davis tries to make a Christian out of General Yen when he is planning to murder a traitorous ex-mistress. He sneers at her attempts, assures her that Christianity is a mumbo-jumbo. To test Megan Davis's sincerity, he offers to accept her as a hostage for the loyalty of his ex-mistress. Miss Davis's Christian faith in the ex-mistress proves to be unjustified. So does her mistrust of General Yen. Having lost his province and his army in giving Miss Davis a chance to prove the efficacy of Christian kindness, he humiliates her for her suspicions of him by the gallantry with which, instead of assaulting her, he sips a cup of poisoned tea. At the end of the picture, Miss Davis is on her way back to Shanghai but not, it appears, to marry her missionary.
Doubtless The Bitter Tea of General Yen will distress cinemaddicts who cherish the illusion that under Tsar Hays the cinema is committed to upholding Occidental theories of right and wrong. Aside from being morally subversive and eloquently antiChristian, it is not an unusual, although it is an intelligent, production. It suffers from lethargic pace, a lack of action elsewhere than in highly atmospheric battle-scenes. Barbara Stanwyck is satisfactory as Megan Davis but the most noteworthy female member of the cast is Toshia Mori, a sloe-eyed Japanese girl whom Director Frank Capra discovered in a Los Angeles curio shop, hired for the part of the ex-mistress.