NR | 2h 18m | Drama | 1937
Producer Irving Thalberg’s introductory text reads, “The soul of a great nation is expressed in the life of its humblest people. In this simple story of a Chinese farmer may be found something of the soul of China—its humility, its courage, its deep heritage from the past and its vast promise for the future.”
This American film draws on an American play, which in turn draws on American writer Pearl S. Buck’s novel about love, longing, and loss among early 20th-century Chinese peasants.
Poor peasant Wang (Paul Muni) marries O-Lan (Luise Rainer), a slave from the Great House, the wealthiest clan in their village. Humble and faithful to each other, Wang and O-Lan grow crops on Wang’s tiny farm. As he prospers, soft-spoken O-Lan smilingly bears him three children.
His lazy, pessimistic, and nosy uncle (Walter Connolly) is jealous; he coaxes Wang to sell his land the moment drought strikes. Wang dithers and O-Lan resists selling. Still, famine kills crops and livestock, bankrupting even the Great House. Worse, the couple’s fourth child dies. So they head to a city to survive. Amid the chaos of an anti-imperial revolution sweeping China, O-Lan finds a clutch of pearls. As rain returns to their village, and the revolution runs its course, they head back. Those pearls help them start afresh.
Buck’s China connection was profound, not perfunctory. She’d studied and worked there; unsurprisingly, her characters draw lovingly from her memories of its people and places. Never mind that the Chinese state denounced her as an American cultural imperialist.
Critics insist that the leads here should’ve been Chinese. But even in the 1950s, audiences didn’t insist that only a Hebrew and Egyptian should have played Moses and Pharaoh in “The Ten Commandments.” Why quibble with studio choices from as far back as the 1930s? Such pedantry might fault Buck, Thalberg, and director Sidney Franklin, as Americans, for daring to comment on the Chinese experience. Besides, neither Muni’s nor Rainer’s looks detract much from the pathos they lend their characters.
Patriotism in Perspective
“The Good Earth,” personified in the silently selfless O-Lan, serves as a metaphor for the transcendentals: truth, goodness, beauty. To Buck, this can’t be superficial. A land (or nation or person) is noble only when virtue lies within: good soil, seed, water, fertilizer. Tempered with patience and resilience, its fruit is obvious: freedom, faith, trust, peace. Denied these, that same land turns parched, barren, inimical to life and living; the land then bears an entirely different kind of fruit: suspicion and divisiveness.
Likewise, a nation turns productive or putrid by how its citizens respond to circumstances. Self-obsessed, like Wang, they’re divided, unable to learn from the past or from each other. Humble, like O-Lan, they’re wiser, and therefore united. Wang’s love for the land turns to hatred when blinded by flattery and a false sense of grandeur.
No, Buck doesn’t valorize poverty or demonize prosperity. Instead, where it concerns love of land or people, she argues that moral values matter more. If happiness is to be the fruit, love must be its labor. That’s about giving, not taking.
The Chinese aside, Buck here appears to urge all peoples, not to rage at their land because it doesn’t bear the socio-political fruit they desire, but to consider what they’re filling their good earth with that’s producing the harvests that they so loathe.
