The good earth of MGM’s expensive ($2.8 million) 1937 film of Pearl S. Buck’s award winning book was not of Chinese soil. Filmed entirely on a five-hundred-acre farm in Chatsworth,…
Category:
FILM & CINEMA
Like most Westerners of my generation the author came to know China and especially the Chinese from Western actors playing Asians in “yellowface” in The Good Earth and Charlie Chanfilms. The Chinese on…
I am a realist. I don’t mean that in a personal sense, because I realize that I am also in many respects also a “romantic.” But, since I define being…
“My parents had a good reason for taking me to the movies all the time, because I had been sick with asthma since I was three years old and I…
The Cinema: a little script INT: SUBWAY STATION, IRT, NEW YORK, MARCH 23, 2014 MEDIUM SHOT: Subway platform and train and modest crowd ACTION. Mark enters the door of the…
The Enduring Theme The encounter of different cultures is perhaps the oldest, and most enduring, American social theme. It is not uniquely an American phenomenon, but one that applies to…
Acculturation The relationship between immigrants and American cities has, on balance, been a reciprocally beneficial one. Immigrants have found opportunity in the city, and in turn have enriched its culture…
The Golden Door The drama of the American city was often a result of some of its internal contradictions. America might be the only nation in the world with a…
Cities were the first places to bring together peoples of different ethnic and racial backgrounds; hence the first places to test assimilation, tolerance, competition, and cooperation among different cultures. There…
I came to America because in the old country I had heard that the streets of America were “paved with gold.” But I learned three things after I arrived: First,…