Palumbo-Liu argues, in the chapter entitled “Rescripting the Imaginary,” that Bitter Tea failed to be profitable or popular for reasons more complex than simply the inclusion of the controversial theme of interracial love.  Palumbo-Liu holds that the film’s problems were much more directly tied into the structure of the story itself. He carefully deconstructs significant scenes and characters from the movie to demonstrate that the film’s lack of success can be attributed to its inability “to establish a stable identificatory position.” In other words, Capra confused audiences by creating too many intertwined narrative points, without laying a foundation of convention by which to ground the plot. Palumbo-Liu notes that audiences of the 1930s were fascinated by the idea of a “liaison” between East and West. The 30s were a time of growing awareness of China’s role as a nation, what with the Open Door policy of the late 19^th century, the Northern Expedition in the1920’s, and the build up to the 1937 Sino-Japanese war. Audiences were looking for films that would decisively articulate a satisfying “progressive” statement about reconciling the tensions between Asia and America, but Capra provided no such message in Bitter Tea.

Looking at the film in this light, it is clear how Bitter Tea might have been considered unsatisfying by audiences of the time. Though the film seems to offer a moralistic critique through its contentious subject matter, it is unclear exactly what kind of statement Capra is attempting to make. In the film, the difference between racial and national identity becomes blurred and confused, a critical assessment of Western imperialism raises complicated moral questions that muddy the simple trajectory of the love story trope, and the characters themselves seem to subvert their expected roles. These complicating factors could potentially create a more intricately conceived story, but Capra never develops any one narrative point well enough for it to be effective. All of these reasons may have prevented Bitter Tea from meeting the criteria of either a popular box-office melodrama or a politically-charged “arty” film.

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." 

In Pre-Code Hollywood, Doherty reviews the production of film during the years preceding the rigorous enforcement of the Production Code in the 1930s. Chapter ten focuses specifically on the portrayal of foreign or racial minorities, specifically with regard to those topics that relate to the touchy subject of racial mixing, or miscegenation. In one particularly relevant subsection of the chapter, Doherty analyzes pre-Code Orientalism in film, and the exotic allure surrounding the mysterious “otherness” of countries like China. The chapter also gives a detailed account of the way the film was received by internal censors at the Studio Relations Committee, a branch of the MPPDA. Interestingly, censors were less preoccupied with the suggestion of inter-racial romance than they were with the seemingly negative portrayal of Chinese culture in Capra’s film. Ultimately, however, censors actually supported the film’s alleged purpose. Doherty appends to the chapter a letter written by John Wilson (of the SRC) to Will Hays (head of the MPPDA) in defense of the film’s seemingly racist elements, in which Wilson assures Hays that “the whole purpose of the story is the convincing refutation of the foreign opinion of the Chinese characters, and for that reason it is essential that the seeming derogatory remarks be used in the first part of the story.”

This chapter sheds light on the political climate of film-production around the time that Capra was making Bitter Tea. It was interesting to learn that Capra’s film was one of many films of the 1930’s that demonstrate a Western ambivalence towards Eastern culture, such as The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and The Hatchet Man (1932). These mixed feelings about the East are indeed mirrored by the simultaneous attraction and repulsion experienced by the white missionary character, Megan Davis, towards the attractive and mysterious General Yen. Because of a precedence for this theme in films, it seems unlikely that Bitter Tea’s lack of success was wholly a result of audiences being unexposed to depictions of Eastern cultures in movies, unless the film somehow deviated in a significant way from these other orientalist films.

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.