China Sky (RKO, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When I finally showed my husband Charles a movie, it was one readily to hand because it was on the same tape as Invitation — though it turned out it was yet another item in the Anthony Quinn “Star of the Month” tribute and had been shown on the same day as The Ghost Breakers: China Sky, a 1945 film from RKO based on a novel by Pearl S. Buck, scripted by Joseph Hoffman and Brenda Weisberg and directed by Ray Enright, with an assist this time from quite a lot of spectacular newsreel footage of the actual war in China, expertly spliced in by RKO’s editing and effects department. I thought this would be an interesting counterpoint to the Museum of Photographic Arts exhibit in that it too was a photographic representation of World War II — albeit at the other end of the world from the European theatre in which the photographers represented in the exhibit worked — and it was cinematically beautiful, thanks to the marvelous Nicholas Musuraca’s work as d.p. The story revolved around the Western-style hospital in a remote village in the mountain region of northern China and featured two, count ’em, two love triangles. Dr. Gray Thompson (Randolph Scott), who founded the hospital eight years before when Japan attacked China directly in 1937 after having occupied Manchuria six years earlier, returns from a trip to the U.S. where he’s been raising money and medical supplies to keep the place operating. He also returns with a wife, Louise (Ellen Drew) — much to the chagrin of his assistant, Dr. Sara Durand (Ruth Warrick), who’s not only served with him those many years but has also had an unrequited crush on him.

The other triangle consists of Dr. Kim (Philip Ahn), a surgeon at the hospital who claims to be Korean but is really the product of a relationship between a Korean mother and a now-dead Japanese father; his fiancée, nurse Siu-Mei (Carol Thurston), and her crush object, Chinese guerrilla leader Chen-Ta (Anthony Quinn — and yes, as credible as he could be as an Arab, a Greek and a Ukrainian, looking at him made up vaguely to resemble a Chinese is risible), who’s leading the resistance in the area of the hospital and has a major ammunition stash in a secret cave where the patients and staff hide in case of air raids, which happen frequently. Also in the dramatis personae are Col. Yasuda (Richard Loo, who by 1945 could probably have played these black-hearted Japanese villain roles in his sleep), who is captured and nursed back to health in the hospital so he can stand trial for war crimes; and a typically obnoxious movie kid, “Little Goat” (“Ducky” Louie — that’s how he’s credited!), who helps out around the hospital and provides the key bit of information that unravels the plot at the end. The plot centers around Louise Thompson’s revulsion at the life her new husband has stuck her in the middle of, and her determination to get out of there, preferably taking him with her; and Dr. Kim’s attempt to break up his girlfriend’s budding relationship with the dashing guerrilla chief: to delay Yasuda’s departure from the hospital he gives him an injection that will make him appear to be deathly ill, giving Yasuda enough time to plan an attack on the ammunition stash by sneaking out a message, ostensibly for Mrs. Thompson to get her a plane out of there but really to alert the Japanese to send a squad of paratroopers to take out the ammunition depot in the cave. In the end, there’s a big action scene in which Chen-Ta and his army rides in on horseback (contrary to popular belief, there actually were parts of World War II in which horses figured prominently, but this still looks like the Seventh Cavalry coming in to the rescue — especially since Randolph Scott was far more famous for Westerns than anything else!), the two inconvenient points in the triangles (Louise and Kim) conveniently get themselves killed, Dr. Thompson and Dr. Durand end up together and Chen-Ta promises to come back to Siu-Mei as soon as they’ve won the war.

There are a lot of things wrong with China Sky — not only the formulaic plotting that keeps getting in the way of the characters’ real moral dilemmas and the virtually unspeakable dialogue Pearl S. Buck always gave her Chinese characters to speak (maybe it was more believable on the page, but when you hear it coming out of actors’ mouths — especially the mouths of well-assimilated Chinese-American actors with little or no trace of a Chinese accent — it just sounds ridiculous) but also the fact that the Asian cast members generally turn in much better performances than the Caucasian ones. But it’s still an extraordinarily haunting movie; despite the rather stock romantic and patriotic conflicts, one remains in suspense until the end as to how it’s going to turn out. The on-screen chemistry between Philip Ahn and Richard Loo is superb; Loo gives a full-blooded villain performance, flashing his teeth like a shark to emphasize the dastardly nature of his designs, while tapping Ahn’s character in every way he possibly can, from Asian-on-Asian solidarity to Ahn’s jealousy of Dr. Durand (since he’s enough of an Asian traditionalist to resent having to work for a woman and assume that if Thompson were to leave he would end up running the hospital) and the guerrilla leader who’s set his cap for Ahn’s girlfriend. Ahn does a superb job dramatizing his character’s conflicts — and so does Ruth Warrick, whose RKO career began with a great part in a great film (the first wife in Citizen Kane) and went downhill from there. This was a relative high point, however; she has some superb close-ups in which her love for Dr. Thompson and resentment towards his wife are readily apparent, and Hoffman and Weisberg had the Code-defying daring to give her and Randolph Scott a clinch scene even while he’s still married to someone else. Add Musuraca’s atmospheric cinematography and Enright’s direction — far better than his hacky norm, particularly in the scenes in which the town is being bombed and he does a good job dramatizing the terror and sheer randomness of this form of warfare — and you have a movie with some surprisingly good aspects despite the ongoing suspension of disbelief needed to accept that anyone in the world would talk the way Pearl Buck made her Chinese people talk! — 7/13/06

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After Yellowface I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for the 1945 film China Sky, based on a novel by Pearl S. Buck – an American woman who’d spent much of her childhood in China as the daughter of a missionary couple and became famous for writing blockbuster best-selling novels about China and its culture. Her best-known book was The Good Earth (1931), which was filmed by MGM in 1936 (released in 1937). Like the book, the film was a huge success, though Buck was disenchanted with it because she had wanted MGM not only to film it in China but to use an all-Chinese cast. Instead the leads were cast with white actors, the Austrian-Jewish Paul Muni as the male lead Wang and the German-Jewish Luise Rainer as the female lead O-Lan. MGM returned to Buck’s oeuvre for Dragon Seed (1944), which likewise featured an all-white cast – including Katharine Hepburn preposterously made up to look vaguely Chinese (James Agee’s review complained, “I’ve never seen a picture so full of wrong slants,” a weird comment that comes off as anti-racist and racist at the same time), but by 1945 Buck’s work had filtered down into the programmer world, if not the “B” world. China Sky is just 78 minutes long (The Good Earth was 138 minutes, a quite long film indeed for 1937) and its stars are Randolph Scott, Ruth Warrick (the first wife in Citizen Kane) and Ellen Drew.

It’s set in a remote Chinese village and features two American doctors, Gray Thompson (Randolph Scott in his last non-Western role) and Sara Durand (Ruth Warrick), running a mission hospital in a tiny, remote village in the middle of the Chinese highlands. Only Gray has returned to the U.S. to get supplies for the hospital, leaving Sara in charge despite the resentment of local doctor Kim (Philip Ahn). Dr. Kim resents having to work for a woman – he insists Thompson should have left him in charge instead – and though he presents as Korean (which Philip Ahn was in real life; he was U.S.-born but his parents were Korean immigrants), his father was actually Japanese. When Dr. Thompson returns with the supplies, he also brings along an American wife, air-headed socialite Louise (Ellen Drew). When the local guerrilla leader, Chen-Ta (played by Anthony Quinn in “yellowface” – Quinn was born in Mexico to an Irish father and a Mexican mother, and in later years he became, as Harry and Michael Medved once joked, “Hollywood’s all-purpose Third Worlder”), summons the doctors at the hospital to take care of his wounded men (they’re too badly hurt to be taken to the hospital itself), Gray and Sara go together and leave Louise behind. We’ve already seen the jealous reaction Sara had at the first sight of Louise, and once they’re away from the hospital and in Chen-Ta’s guerrilla camp, they embrace.

And they’re not the only star-crossed couple in the movie; nurse Siu-Mei (Carol Thurston) is formally engaged to Dr. Kim, in a deal worked out by their families without her involvement, but she’s far more attracted to Chen-Ta and resents Dr. Kim’s sexist attitude towards her. Eventually the Japanese (ya remember the Japanese?) raid the town and conveniently eliminate the superfluous points of both romantic triangles, Louise and Dr. Kim, so Gray and Sara can get together and so can Chen-Ta and Siu-Mei. There’s also an interesting subplot in which Japanese Col. Yasuda (Richard Loo at his nastiest), holed up in the hospital after Chen-Ta’s forces captured him but wanted him kept alive, demands that Dr. Kim help him escape. Dr. Kim can’t stand the Japanese (after all, they had ruled Korea as a colony since 1910!) but reluctantly agrees to go along with Yasuda because otherwise Yasuda will “out” him as half-Japanese and the Chinese in the village will automatically hate him. So he gives Yasuda a drug which will render him comatose for a day or so, during which he’ll be declared dead and his body will be disposed of, so he can make a Count of Monte Cristo-style escape. Frankly, I was hoping Dr. Kim would double-cross Yasuda and give him an injection that would really kill him, but no-o-o-o-o. There’s also the typical Hollywood-style obnoxious movie kid, “Little Goat” (“Ducky” Louie) – why couldn’t he have been one of the ones killed in the final raid? It doesn’t help that the actors playing Chinese (almost none of whom actually were) had to speak Pearl S. Buck’s typically sing-songy dialogue, none of which sounds anything like how people really talk anywhere in the world.

Ultimately China Sky, despite its blockbuster pedigree, is an ordinary wartime tale with good-good heroes, bad-bad villains (Philip Ahn’s is the only even remotely multidimensional character, and screenwriters Brenda Weisberg and Joseph Hoffman don’t give him any true moments of soul-searching with which Ahn, a marvelous actor in the right parts, could have worked well) and overall black-and-white morals that match the black-and-white photography. (The director of photography was the great Nicholas Musuraca, RKO’s noir master, but aslde from some good red-filtered shots of the battle, Musuraca’s work here is nothing to write home about.) The overall director is Ray Enright, on his way down the Hollywood food chain from Warner Bros. (where his best film was probably the 1934 musical Dames, though his co-director, Busby Berkeley, is the only reason anyone would want to see that now) to Universal (where he made the charming farce Western – Northern, actually – The Spoilers in 1942 with Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne, though again he had a co-director: this time B. Reaves Eason, who did the action scenes, including the huge fight climax at the end) to RKO. Overall, China Sky is an O.K. movie, an example of wartime propaganda at close to its slickest and worth seeing even though, as the makers of Yellowface noted, within a few years of its release Russia had occupied most of Eastern Europe, China had fallen to Mao Zedong’s Communists, and all of a sudden Germany and Japan were both our staunchest allies while our wartime friends Russia and China were our bitterest enemies! – 5/8/24