Dragon Seed (1944)

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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Ling Tan: How can you dig such a thing without help? The earth is stubborn.
Ling Tan's Wife: Heaven gave me the thought. Heaven will provide the help. The shovel is there.

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Ling Tan: [to Jade] Remember, my child, that the woman is the root and the man is the tree. The tree grows only as high as the root is strong.

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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.
M-G-M announced that Keye Luke was cast as a "Student Lecturer" but he was not seen in the film.
Actor Robert Lewis functioned also as screen test director and dialogue director.
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