The General Died at Dawn

The General Died at Dawn (1936)

China, 1930s, during the ravaging civil war. General Pen entrusts O'Hara, an intrepid American adventurer, with the mission of providing a large sum of money to Mr. Wu with the task of buying weapons in Shanghai to help end General Yang's tyranny that keeps an entire province under his ruthless iron boot.

Date of release
1936-11-17
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (23)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Drama, Thriller
Director
Lewis Milestone

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 3

The General Died at Dawn is a 1936 American drama film that tells the story of a mercenary who meets a beautiful girl while trying to keep arms from getting to a vicious warlord in war-torn China. The movie was written by Charles G. Booth and Clifford Odets and directed by Lewis Milestone.

Production

There are several scenes in the film that show startling originality at the time. At one point, the camera focuses on a white doorknob, and then dissolves to a white billiard ball to connect disparate scenes. In another scene, two characters have a conversation in which they speculate about the fates of other characters in the drama.

The main character, O'Hara, is based on the real-life Anglo-Canadian Jewish adventurer Morris Abraham "Two-Gun" Cohen. During the early 1930s, Cohen ran guns for various warlords in mainland China.

This is reported to be the first film to use foam latex prosthetics. Makeup artist Charles Gemora applied sponge rubber eyelids for one of the actors.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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