"Lewis Milestone embarked on The General Died at Dawn, adapted by Clifford Odets, to keep his muscles limber between assignments; it turned out to be an oasis in the midst of a decline for the director, a fluid, exciting and original melodrama that has become a classic. Gary Cooper, in one of his best roles of the thirties, plays O'Hara, an elusive American who moves through the packed streets of China with a marmoset on his shoulder. His ideological opponent is the corrupt warlord General Yang, portrayed by Akim Tamiroff at his oiliest. But most remarkable are the sketches of the people caught between these two opposing forces-the refugees, drifters, and flotsam and jetsam of the Chinese port. Among them are a consumptive American (Porter Hall) and his daughter, played by Madeleine Carroll with an intense and melancholy bitterness that completely explodes the cliché of the thirties' wisecracking blonde." Treasures from the UCLA Film Archives, a PFA publication