OVP: The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Film: The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll, Akim Tamiroff

Director: Lewis Milestone

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Akim Tamiroff, Score, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Madeleine Carroll-click here to learn more about Ms. Carroll (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Madeleine Carroll's career in movies was relatively brief, and we'll talk about the end of it next week a little bit, but her two pairings with Alfred Hitchcock made her a marketable star in America, and as a result she signed a contract with Paramount, becoming the first really important British actress to get a star contract from a major studio.  This led, of course, to her working with the pride-and-joy of the Paramount lot, Gary Cooper, in The General Died at Dawn, our picture today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The plot of The General Died at Dawn is confusing.  Essentially what the movie is about is O'Hara (Cooper), a man living in a war-ravaged China, attempting to give ammunitions to the peasants to fight General Yang (Tamiroff), who is mad & acts as a tyrant in the countryside.  Judy's (Carroll) father is in league with Yang, and she's essentially tasked to "distract" him (i.e. use her feminine wiles to get after Cooper), but in the process of course falls in love with him.  In the end, Yang & Judy's father both die (the latter dying literally at O'Hara's hands, and yet the romance still remains a thing), and the ammunitions are saved.

The General Died at Dawn shouldn't work.  This is a film that is incredibly convoluted, with a tacked-on love story & nondescript character actors playing their parts as two-dimensionally as possible...but it does.  The film is moody, often disjointed, but that works in its favor somehow.  There's a madcap aspect to it, as if we're meant to be confused alongside Cooper's O'Hara that I liked about the movie, and it's way better than it has any right to be.

Part of that are the performances.  Carroll is great here, as is Cooper (and both are jaw-droppingly gorgeous).  Carroll, as we've seen this month, is an actress whose glamour & beauty got in the way of her getting to play a part to its fullest (the directors wanted to bring forward her looks more than her performance), but Milestone doesn't do that.  He actually allows Carroll to get some real acting in, and while she's tasked with a ridiculous part (the scenes where she essentially writes off her father are so bizarre), she shows she has the talent to sell an offbeat part to the audience.

The film won three Oscar nominations, to varying reviews.  The Score is fine if unimpressive (sturdy, standard-fare action movie from the 1930's sort of bounce), but the real winner is the cinematography.  Victor Milner's work here is some of the best I've seen from the mid-1930's, atmospheric & cool.  It recalls in some ways what we'd eventually get from Gregg Toland in The Long Voyage Home and Citizen Kane (though not quite that sophisticated)-using the lighting in a way you didn't really see in 1930's cinema, and it's genuinely impressive.  The film's third nomination is for Akim Tamiroff, and yes, he's sporting yellowface onscreen.  Even discounting the significant racism involved, Tamiroff's work here is rudimentary-he gives Yang very little other than a sense of menace, and there's no nuance or personality in what he's doing.  This was the first year of the supporting categories at the Oscars, and thankfully they quickly started picking better work than this.