“A DARK YEAR AND A HARD NIGHT”

By Raymond Benson

From the directorial eye of Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front) and a script by playwright Clifford Odets (plays Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!) came the odd and mysterious adventure-spy picture, The General Died at Dawn. Released in 1936 by Paramount Pictures, the movie seems out of place for the time. Hollywood output in the thirties, for the most part, was all about entertainment and lifting an audience out of the doldrums of the Great Depression. There were some serious dramas from Tinsel Town, to be sure, but General is decidedly dark, moody, and rather cynical fare.

This was Odets’ first screenplay (from a story by Charles G. Booth). He would go on to write None but the Lonely Heart (1944) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which are also rather gloomy and acerbic pictures. Combined with Milestone’s own flare for peeling back the light and revealing what is, in protagonist O’Hara’s words, “a dark year and a hard night,” The General Died at Dawn is not feel-good material.

O’Hara (Gary Cooper) is an American mercenary in war-ravaged China. The evil warlord, General Yang (Akim Tamiroff) is overrunning the land and leaving behind starving (or dead) peasants. O’Hara works for the opposition, and his assignment is to deliver a beltful of money to Mr. Wu (Dudley Digges) so that the resistance can buy arms with which to fight Yang’s forces. Another American expat, Peter Perrie (Porter Hall), is ill and desires to get back to America at any cost. He’s in cahoots with Yang to stop the resistance from receiving those funds—for a price. Perrie thus orders his beautiful daughter, Judy (Madeleine Carroll) to seduce O’Hara and get him to take the train to Shanghai instead of a plane. It is there that Yang and his soldiers have set a trap for O’Hara. Other spies, both Chinese and Westerners played by the likes of Philip Ahn, J. M. Kerrigan, and William Frawley (!), enter the fray with motivations of their own.

What happens to the money and to the cast of motley characters provides a little over ninety minutes of action, adventure, and melodrama that doesn’t totally gel as one might wish. The plot is overly complex, and it isn’t often clear why some of the personnel do what they do. Granted, the movie was made in 1936 and the action takes place mostly within the interiors of train cars. There is certainly an awful lot of talking going on when at any point General Yang could have simply pulled out a gun and shot his nemesis or just torn open all the luggage to find the dough.

That said, this is Hollywood “exotica” in all its politically incorrect glory. Two actors—Armenian Tamiroff and Irishman Digges—wear Chinese makeup to play Yang and Wu (and Tamiroff received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, the first year that category was offered). And yet, all the other Chinese characters are played by Asian actors. One supposes that because Yang and Wu were indeed supporting roles, then they had to be played by Westerners. (Sheesh.) But this was Hollywood in the 1930s, after all, and it was par for the course. For what it’s worth, Tamiroff is very good in the role.

Gary Cooper spends most of the movie carrying his pet monkey, Sam, who crawls all over Cooper as if the man was the primate’s long lost mother. It’s endearing, though, and Sam almost steals the movie. Nevertheless, Cooper exhibits the requisite hero qualities. He assuredly caused swooning among a certain selection of audience members. Carroll, who had recently made the move from the UK to Hollywood, holds her own, but the script unfortunately doesn’t fully develop her character.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray restoration looks remarkably good, given the picture’s age and the Oscar-nominated soft focus black and white photography (by Victor Milner). There is an audio commentary by author/film historian Lee Gambin and actress/film historian Rutanya Alda that sheds some light on this dark picture. The only supplement is the theatrical trailer, nestled among other trailers from Kino.

The General Died at Dawn is for fans of 1930s Hollywood, adventure and spy thrillers, and the ever handsome Gary Cooper.

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