The lives of a small Chinese village are turned Upside down when the Japanese invade it. And heroic young Chinese woman leads her fellow villagers in an uprising against Japanese Invaders.
Directors: Harold S. Bucquet, Jack Conway
Writers: Pearl S. Buck (novel), 2 more credits
Stars: Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Aline MacMahon, Akim Tamiroff, Turhan Bey, Hurd Hatfield, Agnes Moorehead, Henry Travers.
recently purchased replacement for disc rot. Testing WAC discs in ffwd is insufficient.
I'm not a loyal fan of KH, but this film looked too intriguing to just trash it. And indeed it is.
Set in 1937, covering perhaps a year or more, this is excellent war propaganda, especially apt for the time if its release, when the homefront morale could probably use some bolstering, even though it was Japan that incited our war effort.
This illustrates well the plight of living in an invaded country, and the moral conflicts of venerating peace while your countrymen fight and die. While it's clear that collaborating with the conquerors is vile, is it any better to grow crops for them at the point of a gun?
The scorched earth strategy that finishes the film is not new. A Russian village was shown doing the same in Goldwyn's (not MGM) The North Star (1943), 6+. But the journey to get there is richer here, because we spend more time with the family before the war arrives, when they did not believe it would (although an early scene shows KH attending a lecture with projected slides about the devastation in the north.)
Well worth the 2.5 hours.
I wonder if my rating would be lower if watched among other films of the war years. Now it's incredibly refreshing to see something of substance.
Rated 6.2 (984)
MGM, dir. Bucquet & Conway; 8
