Subtle eroticism and splendid exoticism--an atypical Capra classic set in Shanghai on the eve of civil war. Barbara Stanwyck plays an American missionary's fiancée who falls in love with a ruthless but noble Chinese bandit (Swedish actor Nils Asther in a painstaking make-up job), who kidnaps her and keeps her in his summer palace. The film's more or less open treatment of interracial love (not to mention sexuality among missionaries) caused it to be banned in Great Britain. It remained one of Capra's "pet" films--what he called "Art with a Capital A"--and has been compared by critics to the films of Von Sternberg, "with its exalted emotions and gestures, its glowingly muted lighting, its caressing dissolves and glittering ornamentation" (Tom Milne). "It is rather as if Sternberg were directing Garbo.... Stanwyck responds with a coolly exact performance, taking as her cue General Yen's idealistic vision of women as 'beautiful fruit-trees'. Her movements and attitudes are at once lyrical and hieratic...." (Peter John Dyer). While the film will inevitably present a camp collection of Chinese caricatures, Tom Milne points out that in the romantic fatalism of the central relationship, "Capra is able to demonstrate...the gap yawning between East and West, a philosophical distance which has little to do with racial prejudice but which still keeps the lovers inexorably apart."