General Yen’s Extended Career

This week, the Museum of Modern Art screened a recently acquired 16mm
print from a private collector called Target Hong Kong, a 1953 movie
produced by Columbia Pictures about an American gambler who becomes a
secret agent to fight Communists in China. It's a film that history
hasn't had much of anything to say about – producer Sam Katzman is
more remembered for his science-fiction films of the time, while star
Richard Denning is perhaps best remembered for Hawaii Five-O (though
I've only seen him in the 1942 version of The Glass Key), while
director Fred F. Sears and writer Herbert Purdom seem to have faded
into the anonymous mass of filmmakers from the time.

However, watching the movie, I was struck in particular by two scenes:
a riot sequence that ends with the city in flames, and a train ambush
battle sequence. The footage was taken from Frank Capra's The Bitter
Tea of General Yen. Fred F. Sears did a pretty good job of integrating
Capra's footage with his own, but perhaps the fact that one could
notice difference in film stock means it wasn't without flaw.

I went back to Smoodin's article, "Censorship and the Bitter Tea of
General Yen," but found no reference to this second life given to
Capra's film. While it is perhaps beyond the specific scope of his
article, the re-emergence of the footage in the context of 1950s
American politics and anti-Communist rhetoric, as well as in the wake
of industrial shifts occurring in Hollywood at the time, leaves more
questions to be asked about the cultural and cinematic career of
General Yen.

-Cullen Gallagher