The Good Earth (film) - Production

Production

The film's budget was $2.8 million, a small fortune at the time, and took three years to make. A five-hundred-acre farm in Chatsworth, California, was transformed into a replica of Chinese farmland for this film.

The movie script was more sympathetic to China than the novel had been. Wang Lung’s son was now a representative of modern China who goes to university and leads the villagers. The family is a wholesome affectionate unit, even the uncle who in the novel exploits Wang Lung, and the sexual aspect of Lotus is played down. The Hays office, which supervised each Hollywood script, demanded more than twenty rewrites to eliminate what it found offensive. Before Herbert Stothart and Edward Ward were engaged to provide the music, negotiations took place with Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who is known to have made some musical sketches for the score before the plan fell through.

Pearl Buck intended the film to be cast with all Chinese or Chinese-American actors. Irving Thalberg also envisioned casting only Chinese actors, but had to concede that American audiences were not ready for such a film. Though Anna May Wong had been suggested for the role of O-Lan, the Hays Code anti-miscegenation rules required Paul Muni's character's wife to be played by a white actress. MGM offered Wong the role of Lotus, but she refused, stating, "You're asking me - with Chinese blood - to do the only unsympathetic role in the picture featuring an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters." Many of the characters were played by Western actors made to look Asian with aid of make-up techniques developed by Jack Dawn and used for the first time in this film. However, some of the supporting cast did include Chinese American actors.

When MGM inquired into the possibility of making the film in China, the Chinese government was divided on how to respond. Initial hostility derived from resentment of the novel, which critics charged focused only on the perceived backwardness of the country while some government officials hoped to have control which would be gone if the film work was done outside China. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself intervened, perhaps at the behest of his wife, Mme. Chiang, whose American education made her an advocate for cooperation. Permission was granted on condition that the view of China be favorable, that Chinese government would supervise and have approval of shots done in China, and the unenforced stipulation that the entire cast be Chinese. The government in Nanjing did not foresee the sympathy the film would create and when MGM decided to shoot on location in China officials took extraordinary steps to control the production, forcing the studio to hire a Nationalist general to advise them on authentic settings and costumes (most of this footage was mysteriously lost when it was shipped home and had to be re-shot in California). There were reports that MGM distributed a different version of the film in China

Thalberg died before the movie was completed. The film credits stated that this was his "last great achievement".