MovieChat Forums > Dragon Seed Discussion > Hepburn as Chinese

Hepburn as Chinese


Makes me laugh. It's too funny to me, much like an Italian guy playing "The Crying Indian".

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It just came on TV and I can't believe my eyes. Forget about Hepburn what about Walter Houston and Agnes Moorhead. If this is a good movie I will never know because between the pig english and the makeup. I can't believe what I am seeing. Some of the actors look like the makeup department ran out of money and didn't bother to make them look Asian, one brother looks like Jethro from the Beverly Hillbilly's. Hepburn doesn't look Chinese she looks like a kewpie doll. I would not be surprised if Anthony Quinn showed up somewhere in this flick. Where is my fourth cousin with my fourth cousins wife.

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Haha, I'm watching it on TV right now also. This is so politically incorrect. I love it. Hepburn looks like she's insane with her eyes darting around all over the place and staring off into the distance. I just witnessed a scene where she never blinked.
We should probably respect this age of film and take it for what it was, but I can't help but laugh.

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I've got this on too but I have the sound off and I had to quickly come here to see if she was actually supposed to be portraying a Chinese woman. The makeup and the eye movements are positively ghastly! I mean, this is completely embarrassing.

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It is a curiosity, to be certain. Hepburn looks as though she were blind, and reads a book as though it were a Western book. Reminds me of a very bad stage production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" I saw in which the actress who played Stella was Chinese (although her sister Blanche was white). What next? An all-Black "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"?

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Although I like classic films, i think it tragic that Hollywood perpetuated the worst stereotypes and made the people of the oldest and most magnificent cultures seem ignorant and childlike. Aside from the absurdity of using non-Asian actors, (just as incorrect as the blackface era), the music also stands in ridicule having that "Chinese" sound commonly heard in cartoons. REMAKE PLEASE!! with Asian actors

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It really is pretty grim. Walter Houston who is one of my favorite actors looks like he refused to even wear makeup other then a bad ghotee for this travisty.

Listen talk about using some Asians for the remake, it might not be any better. Remember Angelina Jolie is playing a half black woman in a upcoming movie. Asians were very upset about the casting of Memories of a Geisha. A remake might have Jolie playing Jade and Brad Pitt playing the second son and Harrison Ford as the father. Kenuu Reeves and Dean Cain would probably have a hard time getting a part. But to be fair Dean did play Superman. lol

But this is very telling. Hollywood had not one problem using real asian actors to play the bad evil Japanese in this movie. As Confucious would say, Umm Very Interesting.

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I could support a remake, but it's a fictional story written by Pearl S. Buck.

Then again, wouldn't it be interesting?

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The reason white actors where used to play the main characters in this movie is because they were famous. With unknown Asian actors in key roles a film of this magnitude would not have been produced at all in Hollywood. People used to go and still go to the movies, mainly because of the popularity of the actors. Nobody saw this at the time as "politically incorrect". Actors played characters of different ethnic origins in the theatre for centuries. Miss Hepburn played her part with great dignity.

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Most magnificent culture?! I'm of a different culture and I think my culture is just as fantastic. I'm offended by your blatant disrespect toward my culture.

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- there's an all-black "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on the Broadway stage right now. If it isn't playing now, it either played recently or is about to open. James Earl Jones stars as Big Daddy. I'm not kidding about this; check the Internet Broadway Database for info.

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Of course, last year there WAS an all-black "Cat" on Broadway with a great cast--James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Terrence Howard--and it received great reviews.

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Ghastly casting for such a serious subject, I agree we must remember when this is made, but a least they could of used Paul Muni again or Myrna Loy. lol
No serious, I notice the Japanese villlians are played by Asians though. As Confucious would say, Very Curious. indeed!

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Gotta say, that scene with the Japanese soldiers falling over en masse after Hepburn poisons the food is priceless.

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Yes it was. The whole movie was hilarious. I was so distracted by the bad accents and makeup I am ashamed to say the serious subject was lost to me. Also Hepburns seemed to have gotten darker in skin color the more the movie went on. I guess that was just in case Lena Horne dropped out of Stormy Weather. As Confucious would say.. Very unbelievable, Indeed!

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Say, what in the world did the makeup artist do to make Hepburn's eyes look "Chinese?" It looks like they glued down her eyelids or something equally painful. Maybe that contributed to her horrific performance. I loved all the sexual innuendos thrown around by this family. Horny group!

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I, too, caught this on Turner (the tail end) and had to come here to figure out wtf was going on. That was just plain wrong.

How could they possibly have justified it even at the time?

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In the 1930s, Luise Rainer got her second Oscar for her Chinese role in "The Good Earth". So people at that time certainly accepted it very well. It looks funny at first(acutally Pearl Buck always create a comedic atmosphere in her novel), but it doesn't matter if you focus on their performances and the story.

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The overriding message in this movie should be that the Japs as a whole nation escaped relatively cheaply for their combined atrocities. I think of my father's brother who was tortured and killed by these yellow devils in 1945. Surely their continued persecution of whales for 'scientific purposes' warrants a couple more atom bombs for their contemplation.
Let me be the one to push the button.

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Hilarious! This is the funniest movie I've watched since Strange Interlude, a must-see for fans of cinematic absurdity, in which the hapless participants turn to the camera and speak their inner thoughts while their fellow actors freeze in position.


Here poor old Kate looked like she had some botched eyelid surgery which inexplicably caused her to move and speak in a stiff robotic way, like an "Oriental" Stepford wife.

Of course, she was no stranger to looking strange onscreen. By the time Dragon Seed (which today almost sounds pornographic) was made, she'd already played a creepily effeminate boy in Sylvia Scarlett and an aviatrix wearing a weird insectlike evening dress in Christopher Strong.


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I also watched this movie in horror at all the "yellow face." But as it got near the end and I saw how good the performances were, I better understood the casting. Walter Huston is great and Aline MacMahon gives a wonderfully understated performance as his wife. I agree that casting Kate was wrong, but at least they all portrayed their characters respectfully - there was no "pig english" as an earlier poster mistakenly claims. In the end, it's not a great film, but it does have some great performances.

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God, are you all Chinese or Asian on this board? Who cares if they're not Asian, this is 1944. There were not Asian stars back then. It was not considered politically incorrect. Stop bashing this movie for that. They are not Chinese, they're never gonna sound Chinese. This film wasn't made for Chinese people who migrated overseas and then watched it and said "it's not like that", Duhh.(problaby most Chinese people in China are unaware of this film). This film was made for the everyday person to look at. It's made in Hollywood and it wasn't considered politically incorrect, the same with the black faces in the musicals. It's not a great movie, but my main issue was not the make up or the actors. The sets and the costumes were quite good I believe.We all know Hepburn was no Chinese, so what was the make up artist going to do??an eye-transplant? Stop complaining for God's sake.

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I haven't seen the film in at least 20 years, so I'll refrain from a critique. I'd just like to read contemporary reviews and see what the general consensus was. Hepburn was a pretty stylized actress whether she was playing Chinese or not. I just wonder what a critic like James Agee thought.

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Its exactly the fact that its made in 1944 thats the sad thing. The whole world is at war and you come out with a POS movie that is more offensive to your allies (The Kuomintang were US Allies in the Pacific)?

While you are watching movies like El Alamein, Why We Fight and other classic contemporary propaganda films, you come across this piece of garbage that makes your allies look like wimps and decrepits?

However, I must say the sets are exceptional, and the costumes quite well done. It is really only the manner in which an entire culture is portrayed that bothers me. It bothers me to no end that at the same time, shows and media have still hung on to some of these nasty stereotypes.

You're not offended because you think that everything they portray in this movie isn't really a stereotype but reasonable reality. Wait til they make a movie in China about the American Civil War, North vs South, but with poor makeup and stereotypical american audacity, acted by Chinese people, with no regard for historical accuracy, and then maybe you'll see what the deal is.

Ps. there were asian stars back then, Anna May Wong immediately comes to mind.

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I have not read Pearl Buck's novel, on which this movie is based, so I cannot tell if Buck, who grew up in China as the daughter of missionaries, so I cannot say whether the stereotypes in the movie come from her or from Hollywood screenwriters and directors. However, I have read and taught Buck's short story, "The Good Deed," about Chinese immigrants to America to my students and found it a very truthful and sympathetic portrayal of Chinese-Americans and the culture shock that awaited immigrants.

That said, let's look at the time in which this movie was made. The United States was at war with Japan. There were many movies made, I don't think I need to list them on a site of movie buffs, that reminded movie goers of who we were fighting against. The Japanese did invade China and did commit atrocities against the Chinese people. This film, in its way, shows what we were fighting against.

While there are stereotypes in the movie, I have to object to calling the characters "wimps." Katharine Hepburn's character, Jade, enters the Japanese headquarters in the nearest city and poisons the food for a banquet, not only killing several Japanese officers, but also insuring the death of brother-in-law so that he cannot inform on her family's resistance activities. Let's be honest: how many neighbors do you know would join the Resistance in a similar situation? How many young wives and mothers do you know who would commit murder, regardless of the danger to themselves and their families? At the end of the film the villagers burn their homes, possessions, and crops, and flee to the mountains with only what they can carry, facing homelessness and starvation so that the enemy can also suffer starvation. How many people do you know who would destroy their own homes and livlihood to hurt an enemy? Wimps would not be able to do this. I happened to see a stage production of "Fiddler on the Roof" last Saturday and then saw this film yesterday morning. The scene where Jade's mother-in-law cleans and prettys the house before it is burned remeinded me of the scene in "Fiddler" where Golde, driven from her home by a tzarist edict, sweeps the floor so that no one will find an unclean home. Those are not the actions of wimps.

It is a shame the Hollywood in the 1940s (or America, for that matter,) was not ready to accept Asian-Americans playing major roles. Anna May Wong had been in films from the 1920s, and Keye Luke had played Charlie Chan's Number One Son, but neither of them were chosen for this film. Anna May Wong was typecast as the Oriental vamp and Keye Luke as the Oriental clown. Neither role really displayed either actor's talents. For that reason, I wish Hollywood had been more opened minded. They were not, so therefore, we must accept what they did create. What they created was terribly flawed, but there was a message. Could you honestly say that, in spite of make up and language, you did not understand the message of resistance?

Spin

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In 1943, MGM announced that they were going to film Pearl Bucks novel "Dragon Seed". They had not made up their mind who would play the part of Jade...Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner and Judy Garland ( the "Ziegfeld Girls" )..were all mentioned.Hedy won out. Along the way for some reason she did not make the movie as Katherine Hepburn finally made it. Many did not take kindly for Hedy to do the role, cause she was too beautiful, and the make up would have given her the Asian look, slanted eyes, completely out of character of her then persona. I believe Hepburn did do it with slanted eyes. Obviously while Hedy still was set to do it, they made a 'mask' of her as she would have looked as Jade. I see a slight resemble of Hedy, particularly with the eyes and lips...did not look Asian at all to me. Really happy she never did make it and it certainly didn't do much for Hepburn's career either..not that it stopped her future endeavors. . MGM thought they had another "Good Earth" in their midst.

http://i349.photobucket.com/albums/q386/Novel8/Dragon.jpg

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