The Good Earth (film) the Best Actress award (Luise Rainer), the film won for Best Cinematography. The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: The Good Earth (film) The Good Earth is a 1937 American drama film about Chinese farmers who struggle to survive. It was adapted by Talbot Jennings, Tess Slesinger, and Claudine West from the play by Owen Davis and Donald Davis, which was in itself based on the 1931 novel of the same name by Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck. The film was directed by Sidney Franklin, with uncredited contributions by Victor Fleming and Gustav Machaty. The
The Good Earth the time of the 1911 Revolution. Some scholars have seen "The Good Earth" as creating sympathy for China in the oncoming war with Japan. "If China had not captured the American imagination," said one "it might just have been possible to work out a more satisfactory Far Eastern policy," but such works as "The Good Earth", "infused with an understandable compassion for the suffering Chinese, did little to inform Americans about their limited options in Asia." The diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber, however, although he agrees that Americans grew enamored of heroic Chinese portrayed by writers such as Buck, concluded that