Gary Cooper dutifully read his lines and went through the motions, and Madeleine Carroll looked pretty, but the plot doesn't hang together and barely makes sense. Maybe it was a rush job or maybe it was butchered in the editing, but it all feels thrown together and patchy. The pseudo-Chinese characters slip in and out of quasi-pidgin "no tickee no washee" lingo, while Cooper's stage-drama speeches about justice and oppression etc are flown in from a different movie. There's also a monkey that Cooper has to carry around for no discernible reason for the first half of the picture, which is then forgotten for the last half.
Review of The General Died at Dawn
The General Died at Dawn
(1936)
Incoherent plot, stagey dialog, ridiculous ethnic caricatures
20 October 2022