Bombs Over Burma (PRC, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a couple of relatively short movies; just before 9 p.m. I put on the DVD of Joseph H. Lewis’s Bombs Over Burma and then after that I watched (in real time) an episode of the British TV show The Mallorca Files called “Number One Fan.” I already posted a moviemagg comment on Bombs Over Burma on March 25, 2011 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/03/bombs-over-burma-prc-1942.html and this time around I liked it a bit better, but still found it disappointing overall. I’d made a major mistake about it in my previous post: I’d said that Anna May Wong and Noel Madison were playing an interracial couple and gave Lewis and his co-writer, Milton Raison, for being unusually progressive for 1942. In fact Madison was actually supposed to be playing an Asian – his character name is “Me-Hoi” – and I hadn’t realized that the first time around only because his “yellowface” makeup was so singularly unconvincing I just read him as white. Otherwise, as I noted last time, it was a boring would-be spy melodrama in which Lin Ying (Anna May Wong), a schoolteacher in Chungking on the border between China and Burma, and her Buddhist-monk father are accused of being the spies who are letting the enemy Japanese know where and when convoys to resupply Chungking are coming in so they can bomb them and keep up their effort to starve Chungking into submission.

The real spy, to no one’s surprise, is Sir Roger Howe (Leslie Dennison, turning in a quite effective, ringing performance evoking comparisons to George Sanders and his real-life brother Tom Conway), ostensibly a British officer but really a German one impersonating a Brit to throw off suspicion and infiltrate the Chinese resistance on behalf of Germany’s ally, Japan. I also misremembered the final scene: after Howe leaps out of the lead truck in the convoy (he’s radioed the Japanese it’s on its way via a two-way radio concealed in his electric razor, which sends Morse code; the Wong and Madison characters have challenged him to ride with them in the lead truck, but it’s really a decoy convoy and the real one is taking a different route across the familiar Southern California rocks used in countless Republic Westerns) it’s a number of Chinese peasants who, signaled by a whistle from Wong, surround him and eventually do him in by stabbing him with a pitchfork (making last night the second in a row I’d seen a show that used a pitchfork as a murder weapon; the first was the “Judgement Day” episode of Midsomer Murders KPBS had screened Thursday, September 21). Director Lewis, who’s thrown in a few shots with occasional visual distinction (in his earlier days as a “B” Western director at Universal he’d become known as “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because he owned a large collection of wagon wheels of various sizes which he’d bring to the set and shoot through every time he had to film a particularly stupid or dull dialogue exchange, and there’s at least one scene in Bombs Over Burma which he literally films through a wagon wheel), shoots the final confrontation between Howe and the Chinese peasants in an almost Eisensteinian manner, full of obliquely angled close-ups of the peasants as they converge on Howe preparatory to killing him. I also liked Anna May Wong’s performance a bit better than I had last time, when I accused her of “sleepwalking through her part.”