Gary Cooper delivers a marvelously cocky, defiant performance as an American mercenary who joins the rebellion against a tyrannical warlord in China in The General Died at Dawn, a sturdy Hollywood adventure directed by Lewis Milestone. Cooper plays O'Hara, who is charged with smuggling a small fortune to buy arms for the rebel peasants, and Madeleine Carroll is Judy, the young woman pressured by her cowardly father (a sniveling Porter Hall) to lure O'Hara into an ambush. The brutal General Yang is played by Russian-born character actor Akim Tamiroff (in an Oscar-nominated performance) and rebel leader Mr. Wu is portrayed by American actor Dudley Digges (both under prosthetic make-up), a practice that was standard for the era but has aged poorly. That aside, it's a fascinating film with top-rate performances, directed with imagination and intelligence by two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Milestone from a script by playwright Clifford Odets in his screenwriting debut. Cooper makes the most of the wit and bite of the dialogue, giving O'Hara a brash, jaunty flair, and Milestone brings a crispness to the dramatic standoffs, whether it's the flirtatious banter between O'Hara and Judy or the battle of wits between the captured O'Hara and the ruthless Yang. It's handsomely mounted and photographed (the cinematography by Victor Milner was nominated for an Academy Award) and Milestone drives it at a snappy pace as the characters collide, escape, and converge again in search of the missing money. Odets stirs a touch of revolutionary passion into the exotic adventure, which is adapted from the novel by Charles G. Booth, but even he can't make the contrived happy ending make any sense. As a metaphor it's intriguing but logically it falls apart. William Frawley (who later earned fame as Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy) is a boozy arms dealer and Korean-American actor Philip Ahn plays Yang's top operative, and there is a cameo by American author John O'Hara as a newspaper reporter. This is the kind of strong studio filmmaking that Hollywood excelled at in its peak years and presents Cooper at his best. Recommended.