Dragon Seed (1944)

Lao Er Tan - Middle Son: I do not have the words.
Jade Tan: I am not very learned.
Lao Er Tan - Middle Son: Is that why you do not often speak to me?
Jade Tan: Two must speak for understanding.

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Wu Lien: I am neither for or against anything.
Jade Tan: What you are not for you are against.

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Japanese Official: [to restaurant waiter] Oh, no wine, hunh, and where are your women?
[laciviously]
Japanese Official: There are other things than wine!

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Filmed in 1943 on the MGM lot in Culver City during the Second World War, the film features an unusual assortment of non-Asian actors with odd accents playing Chinese and Japanese: Russian-born and Stanislavski-trained Akim Tamiroff as Wu Lien; Turhan Bey, Viennese born son of a Turkish father and Czechoslovakian mother as the middle son, Lao Er Tan; New England patrician Katharine Hepburn as his wife; American Aline MacMahon, no longer one of the wisecracking Gold Diggers of 1933, as the wife of Ling Tang; English born Henry Travers (best remembered as Clarence the Angel from It's a Wonderful Life) as the Third Cousin;" Irish-America J. Carrol Naish as the Japanese Kitchen Overseer; and finally Jewish-American Robert Lewis, co-founder of the Actors Studio and Meryl Streep's teacher at the Yale Drama School as the Japanese Captain Sato.
Actor Robert Lewis functioned also as screen test director and dialogue director.
On 21 October 1943, M-G-M was given permission to film exterior night scenes, not allowed since the wartime ban was instituted in 1941
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