A compelling date for those of us who are ‘into’ numbers; it also marks the beginning of the XXIX (29th) Olympiad, the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China this Friday.  I love the Olympics and (four years ago) it was a quite a challenge to balance my TCM viewing with NBC’s coverage during the 28th Olympiad in Athens, Greece (in case you care, the Winter Olympics have their own numbering scheme, and their 21st event will be held in Vancouver, Canada starting February 12, 2010, or 2/12/10).  Per my movie log, I managed to catch only a handful of classics between August 13th and August 29th, 2004 (ten, to be exact), though I’m sure I TIVOed many more during that second year of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming.  I decided that an article about movies which contain stories about Olympic athletes, though timely, would not only be somewhat redundant to an earlier one I’d written, but would also be rather brief if I limited it to films from the classic era (Jim Thorpe – All American (1951), anyone?).

So instead, dovetailing with the channel’s presentation of Asian Images in Film (a topic that seems to have slipped by my fellow Morlocks during my absence) this past June, I thought that focusing on classic movies set in China might be a worthwhile exercise (pun intended).

After excluding some of the features that played in June – The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and Enter the Dragon (1973), among others – while including some of those below, you’ll notice that there is quite a density of “war movies” among the following:

Shanghai Express (1932) and The Shanghai Gesture (1941) are two Josef von Sternberg classics worth mentioning; the first starred one of the director’s more frequent, successful and beautiful collaborators, actress Marlene Dietrich, while the second featured Gene Tierney a couple of years before she had learned her craft.  Dietrich plays Shanghai Lily, a woman notorious for using her considerable assets to seduce men (who subsequently become obsessed with her) in order to survive situations such as the one in the film – a train of passengers becomes involved in political intrigue between the government and some revolutionaries; Anna May Wong also appears.  Von Sternberg earned his second Best Director nomination from the Academy while cinematographer Lee Garmes took home the gold; they’d both earned earlier nominations for Morocco (1930), along with Dietrich (her only nod), which also starred Gary Cooper.  The Shanghai Gesture (1941) is equally atmospheric (an adjective I loathe, but it does apply), and earned Boris Leven the second of his nine Art Direction nominations.  Tierney plays Poppy Smith, a party girl looking for excitement in all the wrong places of the titled city.  She finds it in ‘Mother’ Gin Sling’s (Ona Munson) gambling establishment, where she becomes involved with the dashing playboy Doctor (of nothing) Omar, played by Victor Mature. Gin Sling is a dragon lady, from humble beginnings, who’s corrupted her prominent politically connected customers – like the Commissioner (Albert Bassermann) – to stay in business and fend off competition until real estate tycoon Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston) comes to town.  Secrets of identity and more add to the showdown between these two during a Chinese New Year celebration.  Mike Mazurki, Maria Ouspenskaya and Eric Blore are among those who also appear.  Late in his career, Von Sternberg directed Macao (1952), a film-noir adventure that Howard Hughes’ RKO hoped could exploit the chemistry its stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell exhibited the previous year in His Kind of Woman (1951).

Like Paramount’s Shanghai Express (1932), MGM’s The Good Earth (1937) also received a Best Picture nomination and won for its cinematography (by Karl Freund).  Its director (Sidney Franklin, a future Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award winner) was likewise nominated (as was editor Basil Wrangell), but it’s perhaps most notable for helping German-born Luise Rainer make history – she became the first actor/actress to win back-to-back Oscars.  The film was adapted from Pearl Buck’s novel about the hardships faced by Chinese farmers, and it includes a spectacular scene involving locusts.  Rainer and top-billed Paul Muni are excellent as two of the peasants, who marry, and the cast includes several other non-Asians playing China natives.  The picture is dedicated to Thalberg; the only time the studio’s former ‘boy wonder’ executive-and-producer’s name appears on-screen, as “his last great achievement”.

Cooper starred in triumvirate of movies based in China:

• In The General Died at Dawn (1935), he played an American mercenary that has to charm Madeleine Carroll’s character in order to outmaneuver an oppressive Chinese General, played by Akim Tamiroff who earned the first of his two unrewarded Supporting Actor Oscar nominations (ironically, Tamiroff earned his second opposite Cooper playing a similar role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)).
• In the sometimes silly and highly fictionalized biography The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), while playing the title role, the six-foot-three inch actor actually had to pretend to be a Chinaman to sneak past palace guards among other Chinese peasants in order to save Emperor Kublai Khan (George Barbier), and rescue the King’s daughter (Sigrid Gurie) from a forced marriage to Basil Rathbone’s Ahmed character.
• As the title character in the remarkably faithful biography titled The Story of Dr. Wassell (1944), Cooper worked with producer-director Cecil B. DeMille for the third of four times to portray the heroic Navy doctor that saved the lives of nearly a dozen wounded United States sailors from the Japanese invasion of Java during World War II.

Other WW II dramas in which the country of China and/or its citizens played a significant role include Flying Tigers (1942), a fictionalized story starring John Wayne about the real American pilots that battled the Japanese in China before the United States joined the war, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), the true story of (eventual Medal of Honor recipient) the General James Doolittle led B-25 bombing run of Japan just 131 days after Pearl Harbor.  The last 40+ minutes of this film details the experiences of the injured American bombers that had to crash land on mainland China after their planes ran out of fuel, and the assistance that they received from the native Chinese, who helped them to evade capture and eventually return home safely.  MGM’s Dragon Seed (1944), which like the studio’s aforementioned effort adapted from a Pearl Buck novel featured Caucasian actors in Chinese (and Japanese) roles, conveyed the atrocities and genocide practiced by Japan’s invading forces on the peasants of China.  The production earned supporting actress Aline MacMahon her only Academy Award nomination; the film’s B&W Cinematography was also Oscar nominated.  Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Hurd Hatfield, Agnes Moorehead and Henry Travers were among those that played members of the same Chinese family as MacMahon, and Lionel Barrymore narrated.

I suppose I have to mention Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), the interracial dating melodrama featuring William Holden playing an American war correspondent in Hong Kong that falls in love with Jennifer Jones, playing a Eurasian doctor whose Chinese family and friends object, even though I’ve previously written that it’s one of the weakest Best Picture nominees I have seen.  There’s also The Sand Pebbles (1966) which would be easier to recommend if it weren’t 3 hours long and didn’t feature 1960’s cool and attitude (personified by Steve McQueen) in 1920’s China.  Still, it’s probably worth a look if you have the chance.  However, a much better use of your time would be The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), which garnered Peyton Place (1957) director Mark Robson his second Best Director nod yet somehow failed to land either Ingrid Bergman or Robert Donat a nomination.  It’s a terrific (based on a true) story – in the same vein as Anna and the King of Siam (1946) and its various remakes – about an Englishwoman named Gladys Aylward (Bergman) who’s a ‘fish out of water’ missionary in China that eventually establishes herself and earns the respect of the local authority:  Donat plays the Mandarin that converts to Christianity.  In the end, Aylward played a pivotal role in helping Chinese children escape to safety during the Japanese invasion.

There are plenty of classics that I’ve yet to see including Greta Garbo’s The Painted Veil (1934) – and the Eleanor Parker remake The Seventh Sin (1957) – Oil for the Lamps of China (1935), Soldier of Fortune (1955) and The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), or decided not to include such as the Oscar winning Best Picture’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and The Last Emperor (1987).

What are some of your favorite classics set in China?