This exotic melodrama may be Frank Capra's finest achievement. Barbara Stanwyck, subtly radiant, is the American missionary in Shanghai who is abducted by a highly sophisticated Chinese warlord (Nils Asther). Like the film itself, she is both fascinated and repelled by the prospect of relations with this butal man from a culture so different to her own. Where Capra's other films are largely stolid and talky, this is sensuous and profoundly cinematic, perhaps most notably in a sequence in which Stanwyck dreams of her seduction by a forceful Asther.
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