The 1944 movie adaptation of Dragon Seed was directed by Jack Conway and Harold S. Bucquet, and some critics conceded that it offered occasional moments of gripping suspense. While qualifying that its subject matter compensated for some of its shortcomings, James Agee called Dragon Seed an "unimaginably bad movie . . . full of wrong slants," and faults Buck's pseudo-Biblical dialogue (e.g., "The wind has brought the rain" instead of "it's raining"). He did not like the "unearthly sepia-tinted landscapes" with their phony terraces nor did he like the fact that its stars — Katherine Hepburn, Walter Huston, and Aline MacMahon — are all so unmistakably Caucasian.