2024 Reading and Viewing Challenges

New Year, New Challenges!

Perhaps I am a glutton for punishment. I always set myself more than one reading challenge per year. Some carry over from year to year, and some are new. Some are broad and some are themed. And in many cases, books read will help me meet more than one challenge. But still: in the past few years, I set myself perhaps too many challenges that were difficult to overlap. So this year, I’ve cut a couple that I’ve totally blown in the past few years, and decreased the number of books for others.

Of course, I’m also making some formal movie, television, and live theatre viewing challenges this year because why the heck not? (Although at least one of them is simply formalizing a goal I have every year: more live theatre!)

 So, in order from “most expansive” to “least expansive,” here are my 2024 Challenges. I’ll start with the reading, then move on to the viewing.

TO BE READ CHALLENGE

The idea (formulated by RoofBeamReader at his blog several years ago) is to pick 12 books (plus 2 alternates in case you find yourself unable to finish a couple of your main choices) that have sat unread on your bookshelf for a year or more. Books published in 2023 wouldn’t be eligible, nor would re-reads. This year, I’ve decided to include audiobooks and e-books in the challenge (in the past it’s been mostly, if not all, print books), and so I’m listing three alternates (one for each format) instead of two. I did not do well on this challenge in the past three years, but here’s hoping 2024 will break that streak. Titles are not listed in any intended reading order. Books title followed by an asterisk are books that were on my 2023 list, but which went unread. Here’s the list:

1.       Ice Land, by Betsy Tobin (2008) *

2.       Let Me In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist (2004) *

3.       The Mystery of the Sea, by Bram Stoker (1902, reissued in 1997) *

4.       The Book of Lost Saints, by Daniel José Older (2019) *

5.       Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965/2014) *

6.       Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (2019) *

7.       The Mythology of Salt and Other Stories, by Octavia Cade (2020) *

8.       Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas (2020) *

9.       Pangs, by Jerry L. Wheeler (2021) * (2023 alternate title, moved to main list)

10.   Becoming by Michelle Obama (2018)

11.   Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda (2005)

12.   The Unwanted by Jeffrey Ricker (2014)

ALTERNATES:

1.       All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business, by Mel Brooks (2021) (audio alternate)

2.       Golden Boy: A Novel, by Abigail Tarttelin (2013) (e-book alternate)

3.       Merlin’s Booke by Jane Yolen (1986) (print book alternate)

I plan to come back to this post and add “date completed” for each book, and a link to a review if I post one.

366 SHORT STORIES CHALLENGE

Every year, I challenge myself to read one short story per day. Some years I keep the pace pretty well, and some years I fall behind and then scramble to catch up (and some years, I catch up and fall behind again, and some years I blow past the goal handily). 2024 is a Leap Year, so the goal is 366 short stories. I used to post thoughts on each individual story over on my now-defunct LiveJournal. This year I plan to revive my “Sunday Shorts” feature and review a story or two in-depth each Sunday. I’m defining “short story” as anything from flash fiction to novella-length.

GOODREADS CHALLENGE

Goodreads allows members to set a challenge. In previous years, I’ve set goals ranging from 125 to 150 books. For 2024, I’m setting a goal of 120 to start with (10 books per month), and we’ll see what happens. Of course, any book read for the TBR Challenge, or the other challenges mentioned in this post count towards this one.

GRAPHIC NOVEL CHALLENGE

I own far more graphic novels and trade paperback collections of classic comics than I’ve read. In 2017 I started trying to turn that around, and I’m again setting a goal in 2024 of reading one graphic novel per week, so 52 for the year.

NON-FICTION CHALLENGE

As with graphic novels, I tend to get intrigued by and purchase far more non-fiction books than I end up reading. In an effort to clear some shelf-space, justify the money spent, and increase my knowledge a bit, I’m going to challenge myself to read at least 12 non-fiction books, but I’m not going to make a list. There are already 3 non-fiction books (all memoirs) on the TBR Challenge which will count towards this.

READ THE BOOK / WATCH THE MOVIE CHALLENGE

I have so many books in my collection that are the basis for classic (and sometimes not-so-classic) movies that I thought it would be fun to read some of them and then see how the movies compare. In previous years I didn’t do so well on this challenge, but I’m game to try again. I intend to write reviews/comparison posts as I’ve done previously, under the Page-to-Screen feature title and tag. I’ve never set a numeric goal for this challenge, but let’s aim for 12 “Page-to-Screen” posts this year.

MOVIE CHALLENGE

I own a lot of DVDs. (I know, you’re shocked. Shocked!) Every year I say, “This is the year I’m going to make an effort to watch them!” And then, somehow, I … don’t. One year, I did a list of 12 and two alternates as I do for the TBR Challenge, called it the TBW Challenge … and failed it miserably. So this year, I’m setting myself a challenge akin to my graphic novel challenge: one movie per week, 52 for the year. This includes movies on DVD, streaming services, and any trips to an actual movie theater (which have become rare for me).

TELEVISION CHALLENGE

Did I mention I own a lot of DVDs? And that I’m subscribed to a lot of streaming services? I did? Well, you won’t be shocked to know that it’s not all about the movies. So I’m setting myself a “TV Series Watch” challenge akin to my Short Story Challenge: an average of one full episode of a television series (regardless of length) for each day in the year, which (again) this being a Leap Year means 366 episodes.

LIVE THEATRE CHALLENGE

I did pretty well with this one in 2023, even though I never posted about it (because I posted extraordinarily little here in 2023, but that’s a subject for another post), so I’m making it official for 2024: I want to see at least 1 live theatrical performance per month. Most of them will be in New York City, but I’ll count any play, musical, opera, ballet, or staged reading I see anywhere, regardless of whether it’s fully professional productions, college, community theatre, whatever. (Music concerts, author signings, and conferences/conventions do not count towards this.)

ACCOUNTABILITY

So how am I going to hold myself accountable? I’m planning to bring back my monthly Reading RoundUps. I’m not going to rename/rebrand because I like the alliterative title (which falls well in line with Series Saturday, Sunday Shorts, and a few other blog series I’m hoping to make regular features in 2024), but those posts will also track the Viewing challenges.

I would love to hear what YOUR Reading, Writing, or Viewing Challenges are for 2024. Let me know in the comments!

Page to Screen: The Bad Seed

Page to Screen is a series of blog posts where I read a book or story and then watch a movie based on said book or story. It will be intermittent, I’m sure, like most of my “regular” features.

Because I am obsessed with “trade dress” book series, I bought all of the titles in Vintage Books’ Vintage Movie Classics series several years ago, with the intent to read each one and then watch the movie based on the book. I read/watched and reviewed The Bitter Tea of General Yen by Grace Zaring-Stone (movie directed by Frank Capra) and then sort of got distracted by other things. So here, finally, is the second entry in that series (and the third entry in my Page-to-Screen series overall, following Evening Primrose). WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS (can’t discuss the differences between the book and the movie without spoiling).

BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: The Bad Seed

AUTHOR: William March

205 of pages, Vintage Books, ISBN 9781101872659 (paperback)

DESCRIPTION: (from back cover): There’s something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she’s the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when the neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around? Originally published in 1954, William March’s final novel was an instant bestseller and National Book Award finalist before it was adapted for the stage and made into the 1956 film.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: William March’s final novel isn’t perfect by any means, and in fact may be a bit problematic as it trades so heavily on stereotypes of women and black characters. But it gave us one of the most chilling, creepiest child villains ever written. Rhoda Penmark is, in my opinion, the gold standard by which all other child villains in horror fiction should be judged. She is truly sociopathic, and none of her evil can be blamed on a supernatural aspect. Blamed on genetics, sure, as March explicates late in the book. But this is pure human evil distilled into an innocent-looking (and usually innocent-acting) eight-year-old.

Of course, if this were just 200+ pages of evil actions by a kid, the book would probably get boring pretty quickly. What makes the book work for me is that we as the reader are never really in Rhoda’s head. We hear her “rationale” (if it can even be called that) for killing her classmate Claude Daigle, and we see the series of interactions with Leroy Jessup that lead to the penultimate scene in the book. Most of what we see is filtered through the eyes of Rhoda’s mother Christine. With her husband away in South America on business and her parents deceased (and her husband’s family emotionally distant), Christine is functioning as a single mother albeit surrounded by older folks who adore Rhoda and want to help. Christine’s character arc – from a mother concerned about her too-perfect daughter’s socialization skills to a mother in denial that her daughter is a murderer to a woman torn between her forgotten past and an uncertain future – is a compelling read. March may handle most of the women in this book as stereotypes, but he gives Christine much more depth. And it is Christine’s research into serial killers (prompted by a dinner party conversation with a friend of a friend) to understand her daughter that leads to the reveal of her repressed memories about her own past. The hints leading up to the reveal are well-placed in dreams and half-asides, but the actual reveal is a bit awkwardly staged, just about the only time in the book where a flashback through Christine’s point-of-view fails to be effective.

As mentioned, the other female characters are barely more than stereotypes: Monica Breedlove is a blowhard who must be the center of attention in all things (starting with her officious gifting to Rhoda of a pendant). Hortense Daigle never really rises above the stereotype of braying alcoholic – I wanted to feel more for the woman whose only son is killed by Rhoda simply for the “crime” of winning an award Rhoda thought she deserved more. Rhoda and Claude’s school is run by a trio of spinsters called the Sisters Fern – and while each is given her own first name and role at the school, I’m hard-pressed now to remember what those names are or what their official jobs were at the school that bears their name. And the male characters fare mostly worse: Christine’s husband is off-screen until the very final pages of the book, Christine’s famous reporter father is only mentioned in flashback, Monica’s brother Emory is a drunken flirt, and Emory’s friend Reginald Trasker is a mere plot device, existing only to provide Christine with the research he’s developed on his favorite subject (in general, serial killers, and in specific, one Bessie Denker). Even Leroy Jessup, Rhoda’s primary foil for much of the book, never really rises to the level of fully realized character. Leroy is the apartment complex handyman and the only other adult who sees through Rhoda’s prim-and-polite exterior, but he’s mostly stereotype: he’s the lazy black working class guy who is horny for women (especially Christine), hates anyone who thinks they are better than him (Monica and Emory) and has a big chip on his shoulder. The scenes between Rhoda and Leroy are tense and build the drama of the book overall (when is little Rhoda going to turn on him?) but Leroy’s inner monologues and home-life scenes read like March is just ticking boxes in writing a “standard Negro character.”

Despite the stereotype-ridden supporting cast, the book is a great read for the characters of Rhoda and Christine, and for an ending that must have shocked readers when the book first came out: the heroine of the story (Christine) attempts a murder-suicide – but only the suicide part is successful. The troubled but basically good mother dies while the evil child survives idea is now a trope of horror movies, but it had to be a surprise at the time. For my money, it’s a perfect ending to the book.

MOVIE REVIEW

TITLE: The Bad Seed

DIRECTOR: Mervyn Leroy

CAST: Nancy Kelly (Christine), Patty McCormack (Rhoda), Evelyn Varden (Monica), Eileen Heckart (Hortense), Henry Jones (Leroy), Paul Fix (Richard Bravo)

2 hours and 9 minutes, black and white, 1956, Warner Brothers

DESCRIPTION: (from IMDb): Christine Penmark seems to have it all: a lovely home, a loving husband, and the most "perfect" daughter in the world. But since childhood, Christine has suffered from the most terrible recurring nightmare. And her "perfect" daughter's accomplishments include lying, theft and possibly much, much worse. Only Christine knows the truth about her daughter and only Christine's father knows the truth about her nightmare.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: The journey from novel to movie took a side-step into the world of live theatre, and it’s really the stage play that Mervyn Leroy adapts for this classic film. With a couple of exceptions, he sticks to the Broadway staging, which in places can feel a bit stilted and staged as it forces almost all of the action to take place in Christine and Rhoda Penmark’s living room. There are a few cut-away scenes (to the streets outside the apartment building, the lake where Claude Daigle dies (although we don’t see the death), the apartment’s backyard, and to the hospital) which are very effective when used, but they are few and far between.

The staging being somewhat static, it’s the performances that carry the film. Most of the actors carried over from the Broadway production. Patty McCormack had had plenty of time to hone her performance as Rhoda and it’s pretty much perfect. Her ability to go from innocently polite to cloyingly sweet to angrily psychotic within seconds is impressive. Nancy Kelly is wonderful as Christine, but the character lacks the excellent progression of the novel: Christine looks harried and afraid of her daughter from the very first scene rather than having that fear develop as the story goes on. Still, Kelly is a strong presence on screen and she makes you believe every moment of her performance. Interestingly, Eileen Heckart’s portrayal of Hortense Daigle rises above the base stereotype of the novel. You can hear Hortense’s heartbreak and despondency in every slurred line of dialogue, see it in every misstep and in her slouched posture. Heckart’s performance is one of the standouts of the supporting cast, alongside Henry Jones as Leroy Jessup. The Broadway show (and thus, the movie) changed Leroy from a black man to a white guy. I’m not sure why, but Jones’ performance is pitch perfect. He’s lascivious when leering after Christine, angry when dealing with Monica, and insincerely apologetic to both. But the scenes between Jones and McCormack, especially the one in the backyard arbor, match the tension of the novel. You’re just waiting for Rhoda to crack and when she does Jones plays Leroy’s fear as the very potent thing it is. This is a man who realizes, even more than he does in the novel, that he just brought the full attention of a predator to bear on him, and he has only himself to blame for it.

The change of Leroy from a black character to a white one (leaving the movie with absolutely no people of color, even in background scenes) and setting most of the action in the Penmark living room are not the only difference from book to movie. Some of the other changes are basically inconsequential to the story (instead of being a businessman, Mister Penmark now works for the military and has been called to Washington DC; instead of three Fern Sisters, there is only one), but two are pretty substantial. The first is that Christine’s father, reporter Richard Bravo, is alive and comes for a visit. This was a change made for the stage play, and allows the reveal of Christine’s past to happen via dialogue instead of monologue – which makes it much more effective and gives Nancy Kelly some of her finest moments in the movie, opposite the understated Paul Fix as her father. The love these two share is palpable in every moment of their screen time together, and Fix really drives home how much it hearts Richard to reveal a past to Christine that he hoped she’d never have to be burdened with. I really wish March had given us this in the novel as well.

The other major change is to the ending of the story. The play retained the partially “successful” murder-suicide shock ending, but that wouldn’t fly in Code-era Hollywood. So Christine and Rhoda both survive the murder-suicide – but Rhoda is killed in a cheesily-staged final scene where she makes a midnight, thunderstorm-covered trip back to the lake where she killed Mark and is struck by lightning while standing on the pier. In one respect, it’s nice to see Rhoda get the comeuppance she deserves, but it robs the ending of all the power it has in the book (despite the director’s attempt to draw out the suspense of who lived and died via the scenes in the hospital). It’s the only part of the movie I really didn’t like.

One other weird bit of business. The closing credits are staged as they would be on Broadway, with each actor taking a bow. Nancy Kelly is the last one, and after her bow she looks off-camera and says “and as for you…” and then walks over to the living room sofa, pulls McCormack over her lap and proceeds to jokingly “spank” her, with McCormack laughing the whole while. Almost like the studio felt they needed to give the audience one more reminder that these were just actors in a movie and that McCormack wasn’t really an evil psychotic murderer.

The Bad Seed has been adapted to film twice more, for television. The 1985 version on ABC, which I have vague memories of seeing the commercials for but not of actually watching, started Blair Brown as Christine, Lynn Redgrave as Monica, David Carradine as Leroy, and David Ogden Stiers as Emory, with Carrie Wells as Rachel (Rhoda) and Chad Allen as Mark (Claude) Daigle. I plan to watch it soon and probably write a review. In 2018, Lifetime aired a version with Rob Lowe as the distraught parent and pretty much all of the names changed. This version is apparently not on DVD (I haven’t searched for it on streaming because honestly it sounds pretty bad).

Page To Screen: Evening Primrose

Page to Screen is a series of blog posts where I read a book or story and then watch a movie based on said book or story. It will be intermittent, I’m sure, like most of my “regular” features. The first, unofficial Page to Screen entry was my review of The Bitter Tea of General Yen and the classic movie adapted from it.

Okay, so this one is technically a little backwards from the intent, because I first saw the television musical version of Evening Primrose at the Museum of Television Arts in New York City back in the late 90s. I had not seen it since then. When I discovered that the episode was on DVD and that the short story it was based on was available in print, I decided it was time to read the original story and rewatch the movie. WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS, FOR BOTH THE STORY AND THE TELEVISION EPISODE. I can’t talk about the differences between the two without spoiling stuff.

STORY REVIEW

“Evening Primrose” by John Collier is a brief twelve pages, an “accidentally found manuscript” type of story. The story purports to have been found scribbled in a pad of Highlife Bond paper bought by a customer at Bracey’s Giant Emporium. What the purchaser of the notepad (a Miss Sadie Brodribb) thinks of the tale she’s accidentally purchased, we never learn. As is the nature of people, she probably thought it was some kind of practical joke by the store employees (akin to finding a “help, I’m being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory” note in your fortune cookie). The story itself is the first person account of Mr. Charles Snell, a poet who decides the real world is no longer for him and that he’ll live in Bracey’s. He’ll hide during the day, and eat/drink/write poetry at night, deftly avoiding the store’s night watchman. He quickly discovers he’s not alone in living in the store, that this is a thing people do in stores large and small all across the city – people who for one reason or another have eschewed normal society. The community in Bracey’s has a hierarchy, at the top of which sits the regal Mrs. Vanderpant, and at the bottom of which sits a teen serving girl named Ella. Charles is warned that people who betray the community are sentenced to removal by the Dark Men, who turn the offendees into mannequins. Charles falls in love with the servant girl, who is in love with the night watchman (who remains oblivious to the community living around him). Charles decides to respect Ella’s love for another man and to help them meet and escape. Only in his emotional despair over Ella not loving him, he spills the beans to a community member he trusts. The story ends with Ella trussed up for the Dark Men and Charles determined to find the night watchman and rescue her. Charles’ final lines indicate his plan to leave his notes where a customer might find them, in case his plan to rescue Ella results in himself and the watchman also being killed. 

It’s a tightly-told story, and Collier builds the mystery of the community and threat of the Dark Men smoothly throughout the story – but the ending feels just a bit too abrupt. Charles declares his love, gets rebuffed, accidentally betrays Ella, and sets his plan to rescue her all within the final two pages of the story. I wish Collier had built the suspense of what would happen to Ella and Charles just a little bit more before the end. Regardless, I enjoyed the concept, the mood, the reveal of Charles’ character, the development of the Bracey’s community (and their relationship to communities in other stores) and eerie threat of the Dark Men.

“MOVIE” REVIEW

The television episode “Evening Primrose” first aired on November 16, 1966 as a part of the ABC Stage 67 anthology series. I would have been a whole three months old. I have no clue whether my parents watched it. Given their love of television and my father’s love of musicals, I’m going to guess they did. It starred the perfectly cast Anthony Perkins as misanthropic poet Charles Snell and Charmaine Carr as innocent, uneducated Ella Harkness, with Dorothy Stickney as more dotty-than-regal Mrs. Monday (a renamed Mrs. Vanderpant).

It’s a musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Goldman and directed by Paul Bogart. The creators and cast do a wonderful job translating the mood of the story to the screen – all the “free but still sort of trapped” sensibility, the rigidness of the Paul Stern (renamed from Bracey’s) store community, the threat of the Dark Men is there in the staging, dialogue, lyrics and instrumental music – and hey fix the pacing issue I had with the story, giving the romantic relationship more time to develop and giving space to the real threat of the Dark Men at the end. The songs start out character-centric and then become plot-propelling. Charles’ song “If You Can Find Me I’m Here” is one of the best misanthropic “you don’t like my art, screw you” songs ever written, while Ella’s “I Remember Sky” is a wistfully beautiful piece. The duet “When” moves their relationship along and incorporates their fears of being found out, while the duet “Take Me to the World” is the point at which the plot turns towards the big denouement.  

There are a couple of significant changes to the story, as often happens in page-to-screen adaptations. Ella is now an adult (to remove the ickiness of a poet in his late twenties falling in love with a sixteen-year-old, I assume) and her mistreatment at the hands of the older community members is made more explicit (including that they have never taught her to read, write, or do math, and force her to live in the store basement). Instead of unrequited love, Ella falls as much in love with Charles as he does with her. And in what I think is a very sensible change that heightens the drama of the last act, the couple is found out not through Charles intentionally revealing his feelings to his ‘trusted friend’ Roscoe, but because Charles accidentally turns on the store’s speaker system while they are singing “Take Me To The World” and unknowingly lets the entire store community know what they are planning (the night watchman hears too, thus revealing that there are people living in the store even if he can’t manage to find them, which puts him in danger without having to work in the awkward love triangle).

The final act is a wonderful game of cat-and-mouse through the store as Mrs. Monday and Roscoe try to delay Charles and Ella long enough for the Dark Men to catch them. The fate of the characters implied by the structure of Collier’s story is made explicit in the final scenes of the episode. I always thought it was a delightfully dark ending, and I’m glad Goldman and Sondheim didn’t decide to change it for television.

Interesting trivia: while the television episode originally aired in color, the only print remaining is in black and white. And I actually think that adds to the mood and thus effectiveness of the production. I’m kind of glad the color print isn’t available (the DVD has some test footage of Anthony Perkins in Stern Brothers and it just feels too bright for the story being told).

FINAL COMPARISON

While I liked Collier’s story well enough and I want to read more of his short stories, I think I prefer the musical in this instance.

The Collier story can be found in his collection Fancies and Goodnights. The Sondheim-Goldman musical is available on DVD and Prime Video.

PAGE TO SCREEN: THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN

One of my “Complete The Series” reading challenges this year is the Vintage Movie Classics: Novels That Inspired Great Films series. I’ve decided to read each book and then watch the movie based on it, and review both in the same post (which may result in some very long posts, I admit). Here’s the first entry:

BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: The Bitter Tea of General Yen

AUTHOR: Grace Zaring Stone

195 pages, Vintage Movie Classics, ISBN 9780804170864

$17.95

PREMISE: (back cover copy) The groundbreaking novel that was the basis for Frank Capra’s strange, shocking drama starring Barbara Stanwyck and Nils Asther.
 
Traveling to Shanghai to marry her medical missionary fiancé, the beautiful Megan Davis finds herself caught in the toils of civil war between Republican and Communist forces. Determined to save the inhabitants of an orphanage in a Communist-occupied city nearby, Megan joins a nighttime rescue mission that ends up under attack by a mob. She avoids death only thanks to the intervention of General Yen, who brings her to his palace, where they come to form an unlikely trust and companionship in one another. As the political climate sours and violence outside the palace walls escalates, the motives behind various associates of the General are called into suspicion, leading to an unexpected and irreparable betrayal.
 
Originally published in 1930, this absorbing novel of war-torn China was adapted into a film in 1933. 

With a new foreword by Victoria Wilson.

MY RATING: 3 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: There is no doubt Grace Zaring Stone rights with a smooth, effective economy of words and an eye towards the poetic when it comes to describing her characters’ surroundings. There are lots of beautifully written passages throughout the book and one can see why when it was published in 1930 it captivated a larger readership’s attention. Despite the beauty of the prose and depth of character for the two leads (Megan Davis and General Yen), I struggled with the book’s very obvious Colonial “Christian vs. Heathen” attitude.

Victoria Wilson’s introduction discusses Zaring Stone’s intent to take “a white woman of good standing out of her safe milieu, putting her into a wild, exotic setting … where most (white) men would dare not venture.” The author certainly accomplishes this. Megan has barely arrived in China when she narrowly avoids death (or possible kidnapping) in the midst of a mob. General Yen saves her, and for the rest of the book Megan’s assumed comfortable position as White Savior’s Wife is called into question at every turn. It’s very obvious that only the attentions of General Yen are keeping her from death (or a fate-worse-than). But Megan’s “safe” assumptions about whether the Christian way is better than, or even right for, the Chinese who surround her are never really in danger of being challenged. She rebuffs every counterpoint the well-educated, English-speaking General Yen fields. Several times he calls her on her wish to change him to be more like the men she’s grown up with and learned about. Each time, she verbally denies it but her actions speak louder. (And this “we’re better than them” mindset is not limited to Megan; all of the non-Chinese characters express it, even the supposedly most-Christian of them; people like Doctor Strike may admire much about Chinese culture in general and about General Yen in particular, but they still think Christianity is more worthy.)

Ultimately, one of my problems with the book is that I don’t feel Megan grows at all from her experience. In the final pages, she admires General Yen’s nobility and willingness to die for what he believes is right, but she remains just as convinced as she was at the beginning that the Christian way is the best (perhaps only) way. She never quite says it, but there’s an undercurrent that she still believes if the General had just listened to her, things might have turned out differently. Which just drives home the characters’ attitudes that these in-fighting locals (remember, this is the Chinese Civil War, communists versus warlords), no matter how much great art they may make, are still savages. All of the Megan/Yen one-on-one scenes are electric battles of will and culture, and they are the most interesting scenes in the book.

I may not agree with her stance and her lack of growth, but there’s no denying Megan Davis is a strong character, one who spent a short time pretending to be a retiring wall-flower back in America before becoming engaged to a missionary in China whom she’d grown up with. She bucks the expectations that she’ll be a quiet, dutiful missionary’s wife by agreeing to charge into embattled territory to rescue children and staff from an orphanage with the older Doctor Strike. She’s the most well-developed female in the book, and none of the other female cast come close. Yen’s young concubine Mah-Li comes close to being as well-developed, although it’s more subtly done. She’s a complicated character: raised in one of Doctor Strike’s orphanages, now the mistress of a famous warlord but in love with one of that warlord’s aides – and she’s possibly a spy for the opposing Chinese forces. One of the questions never quite answered about Mah-Li is whether she betrays Yen simply out of love for Captain Li or if she’d have betrayed him eventually even without Li’s love and influence. (I also have to wonder how much Li really love Mah-Li, as opposed to how much he’s leading her on to use her for revenge against the General.)  The only other notable female character is Mrs. Jackson, the British woman in whose house Megan is staying at the start of the novel. Mrs. Jackson is the very stereotype of the condescending “Great White Hope” matriarch.

General Yen is of course well-developed as the male lead: a figure the reader is immediately intrigued with thanks to Megan’s first unnamed encounter with him after a car accident she witnesses as much as thanks to the glowing description provided by Doctor Strike. Strike may no longer be on the General’s good side, but that doesn’t stop the good doctor from admiring him. Yen is cultured, European-educated, full of charisma and strong opinions about right and wrong, loyalty and tradition, East versus West. He is the perfect foil for Megan, but in the end he is just as headstrong that his way is the only right way. His hubris absolutely would have led to his downfall whether Megan had come into his life or not. Again, the other male characters don’t come close to being as well-rounded. Captain Li, suffering aide and hostage to the General’s power, barely registers as more than a plot device; Megan’s fiancée is notable only for his total absence from the action; Mr. Jackson is a sad-sack whiner; and Doctor Strike is a stock mentor-figure whose presence really only serves to set up Megan’s expectations of General Yen. The only other remotely well-developed character is Yen’s American accountant Mister Schultz. Schultz is a manipulator, greedy and selfish and prone to drunken ramblings that cause problems for the other characters. If any character in the book has a redemption arc, though, it’s Schultz. He’s the only character I think comes out having learned something and surviving to maybe implement it.

Overall, I’d say the very Colonial tone of the book and the lack of character growth for either of the two leads puts this one at a three-star rating: I liked it, but didn’t love it, and I didn’t immediately feel like I need to go out and read more of Zaring Stonee’s work (commenters are free to tell me if they think I might enjoy any of her other books and why, of course).

MOVIE REVIEW

TITLE: The Bitter Tea of General Yen

DIRECTOR: Frank Capra

CAST: Barbara Stanwyck (as Megan), Nils Asther (General Yen), Walter Connolly (Jones), Toshia Mori (Mah-Li)

88 minutes, black and white, Columbia Pictures

Dvd: $20.95

PREMISE: (dvd cover copy) At the height of the Chinese Civil War, American missionary Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity) arrives in Shanghai to marry another missionary, Robert Strike (Gavin Gordon, The Bride of Frankenstein). As soon as she arrives, however, the couple must save a group of orphans from a fire. Injured and separated from her fiancé, Megan is rescued and taken to the home of General Yen (Nils Asther, Our Dancing Daughters). While Megan and the General grow closer, one of the general’s concubines seems to be secretly working for Yen’s enemies. Directed by the legendary Frank Capra (It’s A Wonderful Life), The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a provocative romantic drama.

MY RATING: 3 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: I think the description above indicates clearly the first thing about this adaptation that Capra got wrong: the introduction of a romantic storyline between Megan and General Yen. There wasn’t even a hint of an undertone of a romantic spark between the characters in the book – grudging respect, full-on aggravation, the potential for a friendship were all there, but romance definitely wasn’t. It casts the story in a completely different light.

Barbara Stanwyck is, as usual, terrific in the lead role. Her turns from naively enthusiastic wife to staunch defender of womanhood to conflicted potential lover are all believable. The Megan of the movie grows as a person a bit more than the Megan of the book, and that’s mostly on Stanwyck’s portrayal rather than anything overtly in the script. (Although the dream she has, in which Yen rescues her from what appears to be a Chinese vampire, might be a bit too on-the-nose as a turning point in her attitude. I could be wrong, but I think Nils Asther played both the General and the vampire.)

Setting aside the era’s penchant for casting white men as Asians, Nils Asther’s performance as General Yen is a study in predatory behavior and what we’d now call “gaslighting.” From the very start, Yen’s gaze is caught leering over Stanwyck; in a departure from the book, he never informs Megan’s fiancée and friends that she is in fact still alive (in fact, he revels in the fact that they think she’s dead), and every conversation they have is an attempt to get her into bed by making her question everything she knows. He evens admits at one point that her missionary zeal makes him both laugh and intrigues him. The strong-willed white woman is just another conquest potential conquest for him. The General Yen of the book is obnoxious but at least somewhat likeable; the General Yen of the movie is downright despicable. Asther’s accent also seems to be all over the place. Sometimes vaguely Chinese, sometimes reminiscent of Bela Lugosi in Dracula, sometimes almost British.

Gone are the electric battle-of-wills scenes of the novel. Instead, we get scenes of Megan’s clear manipulation by everyone around her: the General, the jealous-but-also-traitorous Mah-Li (whose betrayl is much more obvious from the get-go in the movie), and even fellow American Jones (Schultz in the book). Gone also is Yen’s noble sacrifice at the end of the book, replaced with a “all hope is lost” suicide-by-poison that is supposed to be nobly romantic but instead is just creepy as hell.

Walter Connelly’s Jones might be the character who, despite the name change, remains closest to the book version: Jones is manipulative, money-grubbing and a drunken lout. There’s something to be said for consistency.  Gavin Gordon’s Robert Strike (combining Megan’s fiancée with the doctor who leads her into trouble) barely affects the plot and isn’t seen again once he escapes the mob that threatens Megan. Captain Li, played by an actual Asian-American actor, has no lines (not even sub-titled).

What Capra gets right, of course, is the direction and cinematography: the fuzzy borders of Megan’s awkward dream, the dark fire-lit scenes of the destruction wrought by war, the intense close-ups during the main characters’ verbal battles and the sweeping panoramas of Yen’s country estate. I really wish he’d eschewed the romantic through-line and let Stanwyck really go to work on a true battle of the wills – although I suspect Asther would have been the clear loser in that case, Stanwyck is just that good.