Susan Courtney’s third chapter, “Coming to Terms with the Production Code," examines how miscegenation was regarded by censors during the pre-code years and attempts to trace the exact origins of the “miscegenation clause” included in the Production Code of 1930. Courtney notes that the clause’s exact wording --  “Miscegenation (sex relationships between white and black races) is forbidden” – originally appeared in the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” of 1927, and remained relatively un-amended until the code as a whole was gradually abandoned in the 1950s. Courtney posits that there was no single source that led to the inclusion of the miscegenation clause (in other words, there was no specific individual or demographic that found miscegenation particularly objectionable); rather, the clause emerged out of consultations conducted by the Hays Office with local or state censor boards across the country, suggesting a more widespread cultural aversion to the inclusion of interracial mixing in film.

In regards to Bitter Tea, this book supplies a significant contextual understanding of how the interracial themes pivotal to the film’s plot would have been received by censors and audiences alike. Courtney notes that the actual enforcement of the miscegenation clause was very unclear, explaining how a film like Bitter Tea could have easily passed muster with American censors. Because the miscegenation clause only makes mention of “blacks and whites," films involving Asian-American interactions were to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Several movies, including “Congai” and “Shanghai Gesture", were never produced because of the inclusion of Asian-American miscegenation, whereas other films seemed to be judged according to a qualified version of the clause that would permit such relations so long as their interactions were limited to “fantasies and identities." 

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.