1955 Technicolor Dream of Biracial Romance in Hong Kong
Written: Feb 18 '06
Product Rating:
Pros: Gorgeous color, Hong Kong scenery, 1950's ambience, based on a true story, Communism's evils
Cons: Intolerance towards WEstern culture, very slow-moving, rather "mushy", Jennnifer Jones not Asian
The Bottom Line: Love them old technicolor movies! Especially foreign locations! Don't like fake Asians? Don't like anti-Western attitudes? Looking for action? Skip this film!
frwhiskey's Full Review: Love is a Many Splendored Thing
Han Suyin is a well-known writer of novels in the 1940's and 1950's, a Chinese woman highly to be recommended for insight into Asian cultures, women's positions therein, and the various ways Asian cultures clash with Western ideas. She has always specialized in stories of Asian women trying to adjust to Western countries, usually through marriage to a Western "white" man.
In 1955, a technicolor beauty was made of her novel, "Love is a many-splendored thing", featuring an Eurasian female doctor in Hong Kong, one Dr. Han. Living and working at a hospital filled to the brim with refugees from the Communist takeover of China, she is young, beautiful, bilingual, devoted to her patients, proud of her Chinese heritage, and stoically widowed. According to her upperclass Chungking father's family, she is not supposed to remarry as a sign of respect to the dead husband. That Chinese men remarry almost immediately, or get as many concubines as they can afford while still married, is not mentioned. Dr. Han has decided that she is more Chinese than English, so she cannot and will not remarry, nor risk falling in love again. Her life will be for medicine.
Jennifer Jones with her thick black hair and round eyes does not pass for Asian in the least. At this point in history, I doubt Hollywood would ever consider making such a mistake. If the Mongolian race is too ugly or taboo or ???what could it be??? to include in a film about biracial romance, then why bother? Skip the whole subject - don't make such a film if real Chinese "look bad". Did the producers wish to shock Western viewers? Put in a real Chinese, who is no beauty, some real "peasant" dark type.
An interesting scene in this film involves Dr. Han's return to her dead father's multifamily noble home in Chungking. All the family, all generations, are assembled in beautiful silk dresses and 1950's woolen suits to welcome her. Third Uncle, the head of the clan, wants her help in dealing with her young sister, Suchin, also Eurasian, who has fallen in love with a Westerner and moved into his house. Suchin fears that the Communists will kill her along with her whole priviledged landlord family, so she wisely thinks ahead and sides with the outsiders - although her real wish is to get out of China, not worry about its future,and focus on herself. She wants to be free, like Suyin in H.K.
IN retrospect, for a 1955 film, Han Suyin and the movie director showed accurately the future of such people as this very wealthy Chungking clan. If they hadn't all been murdered by the time of the Cultural Revolution, they would have been stripped of their property and sent to work on camps in the outback of Mongolia or Manchuria, slopping pigs or tending Tibetan yaks. I have met such people here in San Francisco who were very lucky to get out, much as the White Russians had escaped Lenin and his murderous henchman in the Russian Revolution. Some political remarks in the film show that Dr. Han's colleaugue, the male doctor Dr. Sen, is a Communist, who believes that all Chinese belong back in real China, helping develop the country, now that they "are truly free" as he says. Dr. Han gives a nice cool reply, "Is that why 3000 refugees a day are fleeing to Hong Kong, to escape freedom?"
Viewers will appreciate the beauty of Hong Kong in saturated colors, sweeping glimpses of the harbor from lovers' hilltops, road scenes of coolies carrying baskets, busy and packed streets with hard-working and obviously poor people. It was filmed on location, reason enough for anyone to rent this, just to see old Hong Kong, as I did.
Meanwhile, our American lover William Holden: this athletic hunk plays Mark Elliot, an international journalist assigned the Asian beat. He's over 40, married but separated, with a wife in Singapore who won't give him a divorce for the last six years. He roams the war zones of Asia,covering the worse parts of the Communist troubles. His last assignment will be in Korea (plot giveaway), typing away on the dusty trails until bombed. One can only presume he likes the work well enough not to quit it, because it certainly puts him in a dangerous position.
He spots Dr. Han sveltely gracing a high-class Hong Kong party in a Chinese-style dress. Although a doctor, people are treating her with condescension. She is a dignified widow who refuses any romantic hanky-panky.
Everything is gorgeous, with women's bright dresses and the car colors sparkling throughout the film. I found that the script moved too slowly, the lines and action too "mushy", but that the scenery and exotic location keeps the attention.
YEs, you can predict, these two will fall in love, with the hope to marry. Many are against it, especially in the Western community, but her own wealthy family allows it and give pieces of jade as wedding gifts. After all, she is already half-European,and thereby excluded from her real Asian culture in any case. Mr. Holden feels no barriers to his love, and no one seems to warn him of possible job consequences or social ostracism, or of malicious gossip. That he is a married man become promisicuous does not keep him away from party invitations, apparently. He doesn't get fired from his job. He remains cool,calm and in love.
These do befall our lovely Jennifer Jones - she even loses her residency and work at the hospital, forcing her to move in with a friend, doing babysitting, moping around for Mark. Now Hollywood has her as a real woman - unemployed, idle, fiddling with children, waiting for her man, dressed beautifully every day.
The Chinese in this film are shown to be the virtuous culture, although their superstitions riddle their lives. Their girls are drowned, their women are discarded, their peasants are starved, and their intellectuals stifled. But never mind! They're the ones shown to be the open-minded and tolerant, no matter their thousands of years of racism, while the Westerners are shown to be arrogant in every way.
My own view of this
Tragedy brings all of these conflicts to an end: Mark's death ends the engagement
Jennifer Jones plays one of the cinema s most memorable characters in the film nominated for eight Academy Awards. When Eurasian doctor and widow Han ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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