I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Just one correction. The Japanese did not surrender unconditionally. We accepted a conditional surrender because Russia declared war on Japan in August 1945 and would have taken it over if we had not accepted their surrender and occupied Japan.A little-known fact, I'm afraid. If it had been an unconditional surrender, Emperor Hirohito would have been tried as a war criminal.Most people think that Japan surrendered unconditionally, due to atomic bombs, but they did not.As far as the movie is concerned, I've never found this movie to be very interesting. It makes too much of the Chinese resistance without showing much of what they did. The movie is too "talky". Katharine Hepburn is totally miscast and looks foolish.

OK, just to start, let me say this: Katharine Hepburn as a submissive Chinese wife!That alone justifies a rating of 1. This movie was made under the aegis of patriotism, showing our allies, the Chinese, as humble, brave and long-suffering and our enemies, the Japanese, as brutal and cruel. Of course, all the Japanese were played by Chinese and all the Chinese were played by white people. The somehow stereotypically Jewish Chinese merchant who put greed before his family and country manages to be racist to Chinese people AND anti-Semitic all at the same time!I watched this movie for a class on 1940's American film in college. It's a truly good thing that this is not the height of what the decade had to offer. I don't recommend this movie for anything other than a historic/sociological look at the mindset of the decade. For that it's useful, for everything else, it's garbage.

I also ran across this movie while early morning channel surfing. Did not see the entire movie, unfortunately. The plot is well developed and I found myself caring about what happened to these characters but the casting of white Americans as Asian folks was almost too distracting. My favorite characters were Ling Tan and his wife; the interaction with their grandchild really tugged at the heartstrings! Kate Hepburn as a Chinese peasant, Jade, was the worst; Agnes Moorehead was a hoot! Now I really want to find this movie again, since I missed the very beginning then had to leave for work and missed the end. I also would like to read the book now as the only Pearl S. Buck I have read is The Good Earth.

This movie is just as terrible as you've always heard it is. But it has a few points of interest, especially for those who want to revisit the peculiar politics of the WWII era. At the same time that Japan was invading China, DRAGON SEED depicted the Japanese as ravening monsters while glamorizing the Chinese Communist guerrillas fighting them. War made for strange bedfellows and just a couple of years later, portraying Communists in a sympathetic light would have been a dangerous, career-killing thing to do.The film itself has all the production values one imagines MGM would bring to bear on a best-selling novel by Pearl Buck. And as a piece of wartime propaganda, every opportunity is taken to make the Japanese seem like inhuman monsters -- indeed, the way that violence (especially sexual violence) toward women is portrayed here is surprisingly harsh and lurid for this period, and would only have been considered acceptable because it demonized The Enemy during wartime.Criticizing old movies for being racially insensitive and politically incorrect is self-defeating. We are all products of our time and place. However regrettable it seems now, it was inconceivable in the Hollywood of 1944 that Asian actors would have been used in lead roles. And a few film critics and writers of the time criticized the film for this, finding it as ridiculous as we do. From our own vantage point it is always useful for us to revisit the mores of another time even when we are appalled by them so that we can see how far we've come. And how far we still need to go. We can't turn back the clock and redo the past, so instead of reviling it, let's learn from it.Is there entertainment value here? Sure, some, though in many ways this is a stilted pot-boiler and more of a political tract than a movie. And there is one good sequence, though it is as contrived and melodramatic as something in a bad silent film. Katharine Hepburn (giving one of the worst performances of her career) is holding poison that she hopes to use against her turncoat brother-in-law. Instead, she finds herself in the kitchen of his mansion where a banquet for the Japanese invading army is being prepared. While pretending to be a woman willing to barter her body to the Japanese, she looks for an opportunity to poison the feast. The tension and cross-cutting as the attempts and the reversals pile up is fun -- the only really memorable scene in this very phony picture. Aline McMahon got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and though she is the only one in DRAGON SEED who suggests a real, feeling human being, one imagines she would have given the same performance as a Russian, Greek or French peasant -- it is a generic 'ethnic' performance, and as full of baloney as everything else in this curious movie, so much a relic of it's time.