1937 – Luise Rainer
The Good Earth
I am quite confident in saying two things about Luise Rainer’s performance in this movie. First, I think she was very well cast. And the second is that she totally deserved her Oscar win. She was incredible. Yes, she was as Caucasian as she could be, but her eyes actually held a marginally Chinese resemblance. Her co-star Paul Muni, though he acted his part well, didn’t look remotely Chinese. I’m sorry to say, he didn’t even come close to looking Asian.
True, the film was about the poor farmer Wang Lung, and his wife O-Lan, but O-Lan seemed to take the lion’s share of the dramatic work, and Rainer did a fantastic job. If I had any criticism about her performance, it would be this: O-Lan was supposed to be an unattractive woman, but Rainer’s beauty often shined through the makeup they used to make her less appealing. She was just too gorgeous. But she acted the hell out of the part. The way she carried herself, her often blank facial expression as the men in her life treated her with complete indifference, and the way she spoke like one who is used to being ignored, was masterfully done.
You see, O-Lan was a woman in a strongly male dominated society. Women were seen as property, not people. Their only value was in how hard they could work, and how many male children they could bear. O-Lan was treated without respect for most of her life, even though it was she who often held the family together and not Wang Lung. And when the family was starving and destitute, it was O-Lan who risked her life during a dangerous time of revolution to illegally loot the jewels that saved her family, changing her husband from a penniless pauper to wealthy Lord. And for this, he never even said thank you, not until she was on her death-bed.
Rainer just seemed so natural in her carefully buried emotions and her strained devotion to her husband. Because of her performance, I almost felt like O-Lan was the real lead of the film, even though Muni’s part was just as important. She just seemed like a stronger character. This is one of those performances where the Academy voters got it absolutely right. Rainer’s performance was nuanced and detailed, at times, subtle, and yet always believable. Perfect Performance.