Huievest
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Bea Swanson
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Married Baby
Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?
jc-osms
Set in post-WWII Hong Kong at the time of the Chinese Communist Revolution which saw a massive influx of refugees to HK, while this lavish Hollywood movie attempts to make some points about cultural differences, casual racism, attitudes to women and class snobbery, in truth it's really just a big old-fashioned weepie centring on the relationship between separated American warcorrespondent William Holden and recently widowed, talented and sensitive Eurasian hospital doctor Jennifer Jones. Evocatively filmed in and around Hong Kong, it's a pity the movie is so clunky in parts. Perhaps because she doesn't really look Eurasian (her somewhat bitchy fellow-Eurasian girlfriend even less so), Jones seems to have announce the fact every ten minutes it seems, that's when she's not making sappy speeches about her inner conflict and Confucius-like philosophical pronouncements. I doubt very much she'd have been cast in the part today with the recent controversy about actors taking on ethnic roles over native-born candidates. Holden doesn't get much to do other than to act as her lapdog, hanging on her every word. Even at the beach scene with just the two of them you'd have thought, post "From Here To Eternity", that there might have been a spark of passion between them but no, they simply get into their swimming costumes and swim across to Jones' friends across the bay.
In short, I didn't get much sense of their many-splendoured love at all even with the famous song trilling about everywhere before it really lets rip with the full angelic chorus of it in the final scene as Jones returns one last time to their favourite romantic spot above the hill.Certainly beautifully shot, in truth the story is shallow and cliched so that I find I remember more the scenery of the film and that darn song rather than the narrative or characterisation on show.
Steven Torrey
I don't know what I was thinking except that it was on PBS, but immediately I was turned off by the whole thing. This is a filmed adaptation of a true autobiographical story by Eurasian/Chinese Dr. Han Suyin who had a Chinese Father and a Flemish mother. It was filmed in 'cinemascope' and so appeared truncated and badly shrunk on the Television. Jennifer Jones never made for a convincing Eurasian/Chinese woman. Not for a minute. As a romance movie, it simply never gelled for me in the way that "Affair to Remember" gelled, or "The World of Susie Wong" gelled. The scenery from Hong Kong was beautiful and made one wonder, what of that remains some sixty years later? It's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it comes close. I seem to recall the song from the 1950s and thought it was too saccharin then when I was 10 and still think it is too saccharin. Well, you might like this, but I certainly didn't.
gavin6942
A widowed doctor of both Chinese and European descent (Jennifer Jones) falls in love with a married American correspondent (William Holden) in Hong Kong during China's Communist revolution.I love William Holden, so I appreciate him in this story. Jennifer Jones I am not as familiar with. Looking back now, it seems sort of racist to have a white woman play a Chinese woman, but at least she is only half-Chinese, so it is not as blatant as the roles that Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre were playing.How close this fits into the actual story from the memoir, I do not know. But as someone who loves the history of the Korean War, I appreciate how this has factored in. For those who have forgotten, between World War II and the Korean War, the Chinese switched from being American allies to American enemies. How that might affect a Sino-American romance is something only those in one could know.
roddekker
After watching this 1955 soap opera - I'm now convinced that love is not a many-splendored thing. No. It isn't.It was so easy to see, almost right from the start, where this trite, little Romantic-Drama was going. It held absolutely no surprises for this viewer. And its ending was one of the most laughable that I've seen in a mighty long time.And, if that wasn't bad enough - Strains of this film's title song swelled up so often throughout the course of the story that it ended up making me absolutely sick to death of hearing it.This film, now 60 years old, may have satisfied its audience back in the good, old days, but, today, it's just an easily-forgettable nothing of a picture, if you wanna know the truth.
