Gary Cooper continually exposes himself to
mortal danger for no reason other that his love of democracy, so he says, and
often, in The General Died at Dawn, a lethal dose of Clifford Odets as
screenwriter and recent Communist Party member. Didn't he realize that soldiers
of fortune were supposed to be after fortunes first, maybe a woman next, then
revenge, something or other, politics/principles at end of a
long motivating list? Audiences were cynical enough, certainly by
the mid-30's, to know that self-interest guides us all, let alone ones that
hire out to Chinese peasants wanting to rid themselves of warlords. Cooper
seems a chump for all time with his speechifying on behalf of downtrodden we
hardly see, let alone get to know or care about. Still, being Cooper, there's at least dangle
of Madeleine Carroll to keep him in an otherwise sucker's game, something to
thank her for more than Odets. Would the author himself have gone to China and risked
all for faceless hordes? To hear him tell it, via Cooper as mouthpiece, sure.
General's script was one that a Howard Hawks
would have tossed out and started over.
Certainly there would have been humor, which The General Died at Dawn has
little of, other than oddity of Cooper carrying a monkey inside his suit coat.
This may have been Coop's embellishment, as he was known to bring mini-apes
home from safari here and there. Lewis Milestone directs, his signature lateral-moving camera an opener tip-off to who is in charge. Milestone gives
General visual distinction second only to what Jo Sternberg might have
envisioned. How much of Paramount's
30's look was thanks to Sternberg? His style must have had huge influence, like
Murnau at Fox, Welles later on at RKO. Lewis Milestone latterly claimed that it was his idea to pit an American "representing
democracy" against a Chinese general "representing
authoritarianism," and that this would work, "provided we got a
writer who understands the political setup." That would be Odets.
Milestone and Odets' political setup was really
no more political than Sternberg's had been for Shanghai Express, as neither
take on Chinese government policy, idea being that China really had no
government, just killing and chaos. Populace as victims of marauding bands would
segue neatly to treatments of same as prey for invading Japanese. Had The
General Died at Dawn been made two or so years later, there might have been
dose of that, for newsreels by then were laden with account of atrocities that
presaged our own war with Japan.
You could call Cooper's much-contested money belt, fought over by both sides, a
McGuffin of a sort Hitchcock would have had more fun with than Milestone
and Odets here. Attitude is the make or break of movie adventuring. Play straight and heaviness results, downerism an outcome no paying onlooker wanted. 1936 was early, too early, for us to emotionally invest in far-off oppression, other than to be entertained by exoticism inherent in the setting. To that end, The General Died at Dawn succeeds, if less completely than Shanghai Express.
