The Bitter Tea of General Yen Read Free

window of Yen’s palace—and Megan Davis’s bedroom—so identified with the film, and assumed to be an art director’s extravagant, inspired notion, is first described in Grace Stone’s novel.
    The stylized look of
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
—dreamy, exotic, otherworldly—was achieved through Joe Walker’s camera work and innovation and Capra’s direction.
    The film opened in Los Angeles in January, 1933, at the RKO Hillstreet Theatre. In New York,
Bitter Tea
inaugurated the newly redesigned $8,000,000 Radio City Music Hall, which went from being the world’s largest two-a-day theater with a seating capacityof 6,250 (the stage was deemed too cavernous), to a motion picture house with a newly installed screen, seventy by forty feet.
    The reviews were admiring of Capra’s work—“a triumph of repression; the more spectacular sequences [are] irreproachably conceived”—as well as Nils Asther’s and Walter Connolly’s “unusually clever performances” (
New York Times
). The picture really belongs to Asther. Of Barbara Stanwyck’s Megan Davis, made somewhat muted by Capra’s complicated, recently replaced feelings for his star (he’d married Lucille Rayburn six months before the film’s production), the critics described Stanwyck’s work as “a brittle impersonation of the missionary girl, a portrait which lacks warmth and depth.” * 4 One critic said of Capra’s
Bitter Tea
itself, “No picture half so strange, so bizarre, has ever before passed outward through the astonished doors of the Columbia Studio.” * 5
    In 1934, Grace Zaring Stone published a much-admired novel
The Cold Journey
, set in eighteenth-century New England and Quebec, based on a French and Indian raid of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and a kidnapping of some of the town’s inhabitants, a kind of allegory of Europe in its then present times. Carl Van Doren called the book “a novel of shuddering force, of concentrated power and sensitive beauty.”
    Five years later, Stone, then living in Paris where her husband was naval attaché, wrote an altogether different kind of novel—an anti-Nazi suspense—using the pseudonym Ethel Vance.
Escape
became the first of many admired Ethel Vance novels, spellbinding thrillers written with a sense of excitement; a facility of construction; and a smooth, sleek, quicksilver narrative written in another voice altogether.
    The
New York Times
called
Escape
a novel of “compelling and almost breathless immediacy” (November 22, 1943). Lewis Gannett in the
New York Herald Tribune
described it as “a novel with the agonizing suspense of
Rebecca
and the deep compassion of
Reaching for the Stars
,” and Rose C. Feld wrote, “If it were possible to imagine a perfect collaboration between Willa Cather, Nora Waln, and Dorothy Sayers, it could be no better.”
    Escape
takes place in an unnamed but recognizable totalitarian country (“We meet in an evil land that is near to the gates of Hell …”) about people caught up in the war in Europe trying to get to freedom, about a rescue from a concentration camp of one of Germany’s greatest stage actresses by her American son and their desperate efforts to flee the country.
    The novel sold more than two hundred thousand copies in its first three months and was a selection of the Book of the Month Club. MGM bought the film rights knowing that Ethel Vance was a pseudonym. For two years many speculated on the author’s identity and rightfully assumed that the novel was written by a woman—Erika Mann? Dorothy Thompson? Rebecca West?—who’d taken another name to protect some relative or friend living in Germany. And indeed, at the time, Stone’s daughter, Eleanor (then Baroness Zsigmond Perényi; later author of
More Was Lost
, 1946;
The Bright Sword
, 1955;
Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero
, 1974; and
Green Thoughts
, 1981) was living in the midst of dangerous circumstances, in Nazi-occupied Hungary. When Eleanor, pregnant, had no choice but to flee