Before Everything Everywhere made history, this ‘yellowface’ epic disgraced the Oscars

Hollywood, and the Oscars, have come a long way in inclusivity since 1937. Just ask James Hong, the Minnesota-born, 94-year-old screen legend who plays Michelle Yeoh’s father in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and who was 8 years old when The Good Earth came out.

What prompted Hong to divert attention to this largely forgotten prestige picture, when he received a standing ovation at the Screen Actors’ Guild awards, or when quizzed on the red carpet before EEAAO's historic Oscar sweep? It wasn’t nostalgia. Because of the white stars who headlined it as Chinese peasant farmers, he called it out as a classic travesty of “yellowface” casting, grimly typical of the racial discrimination Asian actors faced from the word go in American films – and exactly the kind of prejudice the success of this year's Best Picture winner will hopefully banish.

Back in the 1930s, Anna May Wong was both the perfect age and race to play the lead female role in The Good Earth. Neglected for all her talents, the Chinese-American star had to watch German-born Luise Rainer take it, then go on to win the Best Actress Oscar; Wong was devastated. Netflix viewers may recall this as one of the more poignant storylines in Ryan Murphy’s 2020 miniseries Hollywood, which featured Michelle Krusiec as Wong.

It’s unlikely, as that show posited, that Wong would have watched bitterly from the cheap seats at 1938’s ceremony as Rainer won – for the second year running, no less. Certainly disillusioned, Wong would have been nursing her wounds on her one and only trip to China, visiting her ancestral village and directing a short documentary, which would only see the light decades later.

Based on Pearl S Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller about a farming family in the grip of shattering poverty, The Good Earth was one of the most expensive productions of its day, budgeted by MGM to the tune of a then-eye-watering $2.8m. (Mutiny on the Bounty, the number one blockbuster of 1935, cost the same studio $1.95m.) It was the last ever project to be completed by legendary producer Irving Thalberg, who died of pneumonia a few months before its release, and to whom it’s dedicated.

After Thalberg bought the rights, there was early talk of shooting the whole thing in China, scuppered by resentment of the novel among government authorities, for its supposedly “backward” depiction of early 20th century rural strife. Officials would have stipulated a level of control that MGM wouldn’t tolerate, also dictating a wholly Chinese cast – or at least Chinese-American. This was the preference of Pearl Buck herself, who had drawn the book from her experiences between 1914-32 as a Presbyterian missionary in Zhenjiang and Nanjing.

When production decamped to California instead, a hefty inflation of the budget was needed to convert 500 acres in the San Fernando Valley into a replica of Chinese farmland. Anna May Wong’s hopes of playing O-Lan, the subservient kitchen slave who marries struggling farmer Wang Lung, dwindled hugely when Paul Muni was picked as the lead.

The main problem is that no male Chinese star was considered adequate in box-office pulling power for such a major release. There was no one anywhere near the level of Wong herself, blazing fashion icon and noted star of the silent era as she had previously been. Dissatisfied with the kind of “dragon lady” supporting parts she’d lately been issued, Wong had left America for Europe in 1928, and taken her finest lead roles in the likes of Pavement Butterfly and Piccadilly (both 1929).

For The Good Earth, Thalberg couldn’t resist signing the relentlessly versatile Muni, one of Hollywood’s key leading men of the 1930s, who had just won his Oscar for The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). Offered the role, he protested “I’m about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover” – but took it anyway. With his Wang Lung locked in, it’s thought that the Hays Code’s anti-miscegenation rules forbad them casting a non-white actress to play the wife; at any rate, this might have been a convenient excuse to look further afield.

Rainer, who’d only been in Hollywood a year, had already won her first Oscar for a strangely brief role as a sad divorcée in MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld (1936) – largely for a single scene on the telephone, which has her chattering brightly while crying in secret despair. The idea was that her near-mute role as O-Lan, slumped and deglamourised, and heavily aged by the end, would impress everyone with the exact opposite qualities.

One thing that rarely gets mentioned is that Rainer actually refused the rubber-mask prosthetics the make-up department suggested for O-Lan. In her own words, she wanted to look “genuine, honest and down-to-earth”, and she doesn’t fail (even though, shamefully, she performed with her eyes sellotaped tight). Her German accent is naturally a strange one to hear in the circumstances, but O-Lan’s minimal dialogue gives her a helping hand, and it’s hardly any worse than hearing her many American castmates chew the fat and do their irksome impressions of Chinese people chuckling.

Even some of the Chinese actors fall foul of wacky tonal decisions that make their walk-on characters come across as cartoonish – a practice Anna May Wong had witnessed and decried many times. Instead of O-Lan, Thalberg offered her the subsidiary role of Lotus, a scheming courtesan who becomes Wang Lung’s second wife. She turned him down flat – it was the only unsympathetic part in the film, and she was fed up of being cast as villains. (They’d yellowface Lotus too, in the end, giving her to the Austrian actress Tilly Losch.)

The subdued Rainer barely looks even semi-Asian in this film, but she certainly cuts a more convincing human impression, in her rather ghostly fatigue, than Muni, whose tonsured head, gabby antics and habit of holding his hands behind his back contribute to an unfortunate air of caricature.

While nowhere near as offensive as Mickey Rooney’s famously horrendous portrait of I Y Kunioshi, the buck-toothed Japanese neighbour in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), it’s still fairly cringeworthy. Even more so is Walter Connolly, the portly character actor generally cast in screwball comedies around this time as exasperated tycoons spluttering over their breakfast. Playing Wang Lung’s royal nuisance of a light-fingered uncle in this, who keeps exclaiming “And I predicted it!” when all the most tragic events occur, he’s aggravatingly miscast under a wispy beard and taped eyelids – the kind of comic relief you need urgent relief from.

Such characterisations may sound sufficient on their own to consign The Good Earth to history’s wastebin. That wouldn’t be entirely fair. As spectacle, it manages a detailed sweep and grandeur – Karl Freund’s cinematography won an Oscar too, and rightly so. The climax, with the farmers desperately batting off a plague of locusts, is weird and arresting, unparalleled until Days of Heaven as such sequences go. The film’s patronising title card about the “humility” of China’s people can’t prepare you for some of the moments of massed rage, such as a city revolution sequence in which O-Lan is nearly trampled to death in a riot.

Rainer, respectable as she is, had no expectation of winning for a second time – the front-runner (who indeed should have won) was Greta Garbo in Camille. Having driven up the coast with Eugene O’Neill for the day, planning to skip the ceremony, Rainer was called back in haste by a tip-off from Louis B Mayer. Soon thereafter, she wished she hadn’t fluked this: back-to-back Oscars set up expectations for her career it couldn’t possibly sustain, leading her to fall foul of the notorious Best Actress Oscar curse more than anyone before or since.

With all that said, it’s impossible to feel for her more than we might do for Anna May Wong, who never got one chance, let alone two, to get anywhere near that podium. The Good Earth starring her, with a cast of Chinese unknowns down the line, would have been such a rule-breaking punt at that time that it was considered unthinkable. It might have been five times the film it is, but we’ll never know.