Alan Ladd once played Casablanca's Ric Blaine on radio and here is his big screen entry into Ric Blaine territory - a cynical adventurer in an international hot spot who turns patriot at the 11th hour (Raven in This Gun for Hire was a former baddie who did good but really he was motivated more out of revenge than patriotism). He's in great form with his snappy dialogue, world weary air, leather jacket and cigarette - no wonder George Lucas remembered him when devising Indiana Jones.
For empathy he has a sidekick (though he's a business partner rather than friend), lumbering William Bendix, who does things like pick up Chinese babies by the side of the road whose mother has been killed and name them "Donald Duck", and milk cows, and talk about missing life on the farm, and speak up for Ladd. There's also Loretta Young as an American born and raised in China, who is leading a group of school girls to safety.
The structure of the movie is sound - Ladd and Bendix are oil dealers who've been selling oil to the Japanese in 1941 China; when the Japanese attack they flee to Shanghai, and Young basically nags them into taking her school girls with her.
There are only four American characters in this - Ladd, Young, Bendix and a girl who plays Ladd's lover at the beginning (a really interesting character - he asks if she wants to come with them but she refuses saying all her life's been spent running away from situations like this... creating interesting characters of mystery with only a few lines of dialogue).
Young tells Ladd he reminds her of her father - a cynical selfish man until he met Chiang Kai Shek and thereafter devoted himself to serving good old Chiang.
Pleasingly all the Chinese characters are played by Chinese actors and while the parts aren't very big they do get to be brave, strong, tough etc - the rape victim has to die because she "doesn't want to live" a la 1940s Hollywood but she's depicted as a bright, likeable person; the three "brothers" are all brave and tough (I get the feeling their parts may have been bigger under earlier treatments).
Most of the time this is fairly routine, if well done, war propaganda, with actors spilling into speeches about "the little guy" and "pitching in". But there's some remarkable scenes: the opening tracking shot as William Bendix runs through a bombed out city; Young and Ladd tracking down a girl, arriving to find her parents dead and the girl in the process of being raped by three Japanese soldiers, who Ladd then machine guns; the baby adopted by Bendix is killed; Ladd dies during the final assault. Do reviewers not remember this when the movie is dismissed as "simplistic war entertainment".
The story does feel a bit slight - I've written before it needed another subplot or character - like say a Japanese who did business with Ladd and/or who is pursuing him. Or a Chinese fifth columnist who betrays them. Or more on the Ladd-Young relationship - she's hoity toity and is repulsed then attracted; as it is she kind of nags him for one scene then they fall for each other in one scene. (It's got to be said though, their last romance scene with them chatting after they've kissed and presumably have had sex, is very charming and one of Ladd's most relaxed romantic moments on camera. He wasn't always great with his female co stars but he works with Young.)
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