Movie review - "55 Days at Peking" (1963) **1/2

Very much falls into the "one that got away" category, since the siege of the foreign legation during the Boxer Rebellion is a terrific subject, ripe for epic but self contained enough to do cheap sequences, full of glamour, exotic action and political drama (a dying empire, new nations asserting themselves for money, international co-operation, etc)- not to mention great opportunities for an international cast. This is presumably how the film got funded in the first place - it's a shame they couldn't come up with a script to match it (Phil Yordan did come up with the evocative title).

The elements sound good - Charlton Heston as a US marine, David Niven as the British ambassador, Ava Gardner as a shady Russian aristocrat - it sets up all the stuff: surrounded by Chinese, hostile Empress, the siege starts, the Empress backs it, goes on... But never really catches fire.

You never get the sense our heroes are under much threat; the whole rebellion must have been a terrifying time - in a hostile country - but you never get the sense of fear they way you do in, say, Zulu. Maybe this is because the key Chinese are played by English and Australian actors (good ones and well cast, admittedly, but still not Chinese) - Leo Genn, Flora Robson and our own Robert Helpmann.

Also the film wastes too much time - there are all these scenes which go nowhere, like Ava Gardner tending this British soldier who get, like who cares; and the one where David Niven lies on a couch wondering to his wife whether he's done the right thing - again,who cares? (And this is one scene after Niven's son as been shot - the biggest surprise in the film, incidentally, and the most effective... until they ruin it by having the son recover and thereby rob the incident of its point - but my point is, the wife was mad in the previous scene then is no longer mad, how about a scene that progresses the story?)

There's too much talking about how hard the siege is, instead of showing how hard it is. The scene where Heston and Niven dress up as Chinese and goon the attack isn't bad; ditto the use of fireworks at the end and Robson's scene at the end where she realises its all over; and it's certainly colourful. The influence of the Cold War can be felt: while the Germans and Japanese are loyal, good fighters albeit still following the orders of the British), the Russians are shown to be treacherous and wanting to get out of it, and the Boxer Chinese are pretty much a faceless mass.