The Good Earth (film) - Wikipedia. The Good Earth is a 1. American drama film about Chinese farmers who struggle to survive. It was adapted by Talbot Jennings, Tess Slesinger, and Claudine West from the play by Owen Davis and Donald Davis, which was in itself based on the 1. Nobel Prize- winning author Pearl S. Watch Viceroy`S House (2017) Movie Stream.
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The film was directed by Sidney Franklin, with uncredited contributions by Victor Fleming and Gustav Machaty. The film stars Paul Muni as Wang Lung. For her role as his wife O- Lan, Luise Rainer won an Academy Award for Best Actress. The film also won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Karl Freund. It was nominated for Best Director, Best Film Editing and Best Picture.
Its world premiere was at the elegant Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. In pre- World War I northern China, a young farmer Wang Lung (Paul Muni) marries O- Lan (Luise Rainer), a lowly servant at the Great House, the residence of the most powerful family in their village. O- Lan proves to be an excellent wife, hard working and uncomplaining. Wang Lung prospers. He buys more land, and O- Lan gives birth to two sons and a daughter. Meanwhile, the Great House begins to decline.
All is well until a drought and the resulting famine drive the family to the brink. Desperate, Wang Lung considers the advice of his pessimistic, worthless uncle (Walter Connolly) to sell his land for food, but O- Lan opposes it. Free Downloads Suburbicon (2017). Instead, they travel south to a city in search of work.
The family survives by begging and stealing. When a revolutionary gives a speech to try to drum up support for the army approaching despite rain in the north, Wang Lung and O- Lan realize the drought is over. They long to return to their farm, but they have no money for an ox, seed, and food. The city changes hands, and O- Lan joins a mob looting a mansion. However, she is knocked down and trampled upon. When she comes to, she finds a bag of jewels overlooked in the confusion.
This windfall allows the family to go home and prosper once more. O- Lan asks only to keep two pearls for herself. Years pass. Wang Lung's sons grow up into educated young men, and he has grown so wealthy that he purchases the Great House.
Then, Wang Lung becomes besotted with Lotus (Tilly Losch), a pretty, young dancer at the local tea house, and makes her his second wife. He begins to find fault with the worn- out O- Lan. Desperate to gain affection from Lotus, he gives O- Lan's pearls to Lotus.
When Wang Lung discovers that Lotus has seduced Younger Son (Roland Lui), he orders his son to leave. Then a swarm of locusts threatens the entire village. Using a strategy devised by Elder Son (Keye Luke), everyone unites to try to save the crops.
Just when all seems lost, the wind shifts direction, taking the danger away. The near- disaster brings Wang Lung back to his senses. He reconciles with Younger Son. On the latter's wedding day, Wang Lung returns the pearls to O- Lan before she dies, exhausted by a hard life. Without disturbing the wedding festivities, Wang Lung quietly exits the house and regards a flowering peach tree planted by O- Lan on their marriage day. Reverently he murmurs, .
A five- hundred- acre farm in Porter Ranch, California, was transformed into a replica of Chinese farmland for this film. Wang Lung’s son was now a representative of modern China who goes to university and leads the villagers. The family is a wholesome affectionate unit, even the uncle who in the novel exploits Wang Lung, and the sexual aspect of Lotus is played down. The Hays office, which supervised each Hollywood script, demanded more than twenty rewrites to eliminate what it found offensive. Irving Thalberg also envisioned casting only Chinese actors, but had to concede that American audiences were not ready for such a film. Though Anna May Wong had been suggested for the role of O- Lan, the Hays Code anti- miscegenation rules required Paul Muni's character's wife to be played by a white actress.
However, some of the supporting cast did include Chinese American actors. When MGM inquired into the possibility of making the film in China, the Chinese government was divided on how to respond. Initial hostility derived from resentment of the novel, which critics charged focused only on the perceived backwardness of the country while some government officials hoped to have control which would be gone if the film work was done outside China. Generalissimo Chiang Kai- shek himself intervened, perhaps at the behest of his wife, Mme. Chiang, whose American education made her an advocate for cooperation. Permission was granted on condition that the view of China be favorable, that Chinese government would supervise and have approval of shots done in China, and the unenforced stipulation that the entire cast be Chinese. The government in Nanjing did not foresee the sympathy the film would create and when MGM decided to shoot on location in China officials took extraordinary steps to control the production, forcing the studio to hire a Nationalist general to advise them on authentic settings and costumes (most of this footage was mysteriously lost when it was shipped home and had to be re- shot in California).
There were reports that MGM distributed a different version of the film in China . Thalberg died on September 1. Los Angeles premiere on January 2.
The film credits stated that this was his . Nugent of The New York Times praised the film as . While it has taken some liberties with the novel's text, it has taken none with its quality or spirit. In addition to the Best Actress award (Luise Rainer), the film won for Best Cinematography. The four films screened after The Good Earth (winner) were 1. Citizen Kane (nominee), 1. Somebody Up There Likes Me (winner), 1.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (winner) and 1. Air Force (nominee). Introduction by Robert Osborne. You know, as much as I love color films, and have been bedazzled by the color in movies like The Red Shoes, Blood and Sand — nineteen forties, The Thief of Bagdad, Ziegfeld Follies of nineteen forty- six, I have to say there. Well, film historian and author Wheeler Winston Dixon agrees on that subject and he says so emphatically in this slim new book called Black and White Cinema: A Short History. It's a book that looks at black- and- white cinematography from its origins through its heyday. It's also a book that inspired our lineup of films for the next few hours — those films being some of the most beautiful black- and- white films ever made.
Well, our first black- and- white film on this October Wednesday is one which earned cinematographer Karl Freund an Academy Award for his work. It's The Good Earth from MGM in nineteen thirty- seven, made eight years after Freund immigrated to Hollywood from Germany, where he learned his craft in the German film industry before World War Two broke out. Freund had already photographed dozens of films, including the landmark German film Metropolis. Well, in Hollywood, he first made waves with Universal's black- and- white horror classic Dracula. By the time he made this next film about The Good Earth, he was under contract to MGM in Hollywood, which meant he had the full power of the Tiffany of movie studios for support in telling this story. The Good Earth stars Paul Muni and Luise Rainer and is an adaptation of the novel by Pearl S.
Buck — all about the struggles of family of farmers in rural China. It was one of the last movies made by MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, before his sudden death in nineteen thirty- six. Thalberg was a workaholic and poured himself into every detail of his productions and, for this film, he sent an expedition of researchers to China to search for eighteen tons of furniture, farm equipment and other authentic material. Thalberg then had a walled city built a farm near Chatsworth, California, complete with a man- made river and fields filled with real Chinese vegetables.