Subtle eroticism and splendid exoticism: an atypical Capra classic, set in Shanghai on the eve of civil war. Barbara Stanwyck plays a prim New England missionary who falls in the thrall of a ruthless but noble Chinese bandit (Swedish actor Nils Asther in a painstaking makeup 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 it is indeed reminiscent of the films of Josef von Sternberg, with its exalted visuals and glowing lighting creating a 90-minute "dissolve" between dream and reality. It is the dream of a woman trying to see herself through General Yen's idealistic vision of women as "beautiful fruit trees," the reality being far more sexual than that. Stanwyck embodies the troubling contradiction by distancing herself from it in a cool performance. While the film inevitably presents a camp collection of Chinese caricatures, critic Tom Milne notes 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."