A report on Nils Asther and The Bitter Tea of General Yen

Nils Asther and Barbara Stanwyck as General Yen and Megan Davis.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a 1933 American pre-Code drama war film directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck, and featuring Nils Asther and Walter Connolly.

- The Bitter Tea of General Yen

He is mainly remembered today for two silent films – The Single Standard and Wild Orchids – he made with fellow Swede Greta Garbo, and his portrayal of the title character in the controversial pre-Code Frank Capra film The Bitter Tea of General Yen.

- Nils Asther

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In this 1931 publicity photo, Dorothy Mackaill plays a secretary-turned-prostitute in Safe in Hell, a pre-Code Warner Bros. film.

Pre-Code Hollywood

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The brief era in the American film industry between the widespread adoption of sound in pictures in 1929 and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines, popularly known as the "Hays Code", in mid-1934.

Pre-Code films such as The Public Enemy (1931) were able to feature criminal, anti-hero protagonists.

42nd Street (1933) made concessions to the Hays Code in its dialogue but still featured sexualized imagery.

Will H. Hays was recruited by the studios in 1922 to help clean up their "Sin City" image after a series of scandals, especially the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle manslaughter trial.

This 1932 promotional photo of Joan Blondell was later banned, under the then-unenforceable Motion Picture Production Code.

Nils Asther kissing 15-year-old Loretta Young's foot in a scene from Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928). A silent pre-Code scene before the introduction of the 1930 code.

Unemployed men in 1931. The Depression profoundly influenced pre-Code Hollywood both financially and artistically.

A crowd gathers around American Union Bank in New York City during a bank run early in the Great Depression. The mob mentality displayed in bank runs was portrayed in films like American Madness (1932), where Frank Capra depicted "the thin line between investor confidence and panic in Hoover's America."

Warren William, described by Mick LaSalle as "one of the singular joys of the Pre-Code era", played industrialist villains and other lowlife characters.

A famous scene from It Happened One Night, in which Claudette Colbert hitchhikes using an unorthodox method to attract a ride, after Clark Gable's failure to get one with his thumb.

In the pre-Code film Gabriel Over the White House (1933), a U.S. President makes himself dictator – part of what the 1930s trade papers dubbed the "dictator craze".

Scenes showing guns pointed at the camera (as in this shot from The Great Train Robbery, 1903) were considered inappropriate by New York State censors in the 1920s, and usually removed.

The public's fascination with gangsters in the early 1930s was bolstered by the extensive news coverage of criminals like Al Capone and John Dillinger, upon whom were based such characters as Scarface, portrayed by Paul Muni (1932).

In Little Caesar (1931), Rico (Edward G. Robinson) confronts Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) for wanting to leave the gang.

The infamous "grapefruit scene" in The Public Enemy (1931), with James Cagney and Mae Clarke

Both Osgood Perkins and Paul Muni light a match for Karen Morley's cigarette in the trailer for Scarface (1932). Morley chooses Muni's light, symbolically spurning her boyfriend for the fast-rising gangster.

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (starring Paul Muni, 1932) was based on the autobiographical memoirs of Robert E. Burns, who was himself a fugitive when the picture was released. The film proved to be a powerful catalyst for later criminal-justice and social reforms.

The titles of pre-Code films were often deliberately provocative. Though violent, Safe in Hell (1931) was a socially modern, thoughtful film.

Some objected to publicity photos such as this 1932 shot of Ina Claire posing seductively on a chaise lounge from The Greeks Had a Word for Them.

Kay Johnson in Madam Satan (1930), directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

Marlene Dietrich's open bisexuality caused an uproar. In 1933 her studio, Paramount, signed a largely ineffectual agreement not to depict women in men's clothes in their films.

Dancers rehearsing in abbreviated clothing in 42nd Street (1933) illustrates the allure of the backstage musical

The "By a Waterfall" number from Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade (1933), which also highlighted James Cagney's dancing talents.

Harry Earles of The Doll Family and Olga Baclanova in the controversial Freaks (1932).

Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931). The monster's brutality shocked many moviegoers, as did the doctor's declaration that "Now I know what it feels like to be God!" By the time of Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the Code was in full effect.

In Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), the shadow of the ape's hand appears over head of Camille (Sidney Fox) as it enters her room. What follows has been dubbed "interspecies miscegenation" by film historian Thomas Doherty.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), one of the first American films to portray the horrors of World War I, received great praise from the public for its humanitarian, anti-war message.

The PCA seal of approval in the 1930s. The Seal appeared before every picture approved by the MPPDA.

Scenes such as this, in which a man is about to kiss a woman in bed in her nightgown, (Warren William and Ann Dvorak in 1932's Three on a Match) were proscribed by the Production Code. After 1934, a scene such as this would not appear in a Hollywood film for decades.

Shirley Temple, a rising star in 1934, was advertised as "an attraction that will serve as an answer to many of the attacks that are being hurled at pictures."

Leo Gorcey and James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)

The sexually charged Baby Face (1933) starred Barbara Stanwyck, who "had it and made it pay".

Films such as The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), Shanghai Express (1932) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), explored the exoticism of the Far East—by using white actors, not Asians, in the lead roles.

Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen was not quite the same type of film: Stanwyck plays a missionary who goes to civil-war-torn China and meets the titular general (played by Nils Asther) after his car kills the driver of her rickshaw.