Frank Capra's 1933 film "The Biter Tea of General Yen" was given the honor of premiering at the grand opening of New York City's Radio City Music Hall. With a budget of around $1 million dollars, it was one of Columbia Studio's most ambitious high-profile projects to date. Despite this, the movie immediately revealed itself to be a box-office flop, one of only two of Capra's moves to prove financially unsuccessful. This annotated bibliography will explore the reasons for the film's unexpectedly poor reception. Was the film doomed to failure because audiences were not yet ready for portrayals of inter-racial romance? Was the film's success crippled by censorship from various foreign markets? Was the serious subject-matter simply ill-suited for the Depression-era climate? Most broadly, this bibliography will attempt to understand the historical context out of which Bitter Tea arose.