CHINA: a far from smashing experience

There's the fine bone/porcelain stuff and then there's the plastic stuff that looks like the real thing until you touch it. Paramount's 1943 offering CHINA is most definitely the latter. It's cheap, disposable and disappointing.

By the early 1940s China and its people were no longer the mysterious, half civilised exotics that had so fired Hollywood's imagination in the 1930s, when films such as 'Shanghai Express' and 'the Bitter Tea of General Yen' offered an image that was both seductive and frightening. Now China and the USA were allies fighting a common enemy - the despised Japanese. As such it was important to portray them as less like 'the other' and more like us.
Subtlety has never been Hollywood's strongest point so the producers of CHINA decided to achieve this by having every Chinese character speak near perfect English with a strong American accent. And having taken this liberty with reality it was a case of anything goes. The cast is a rag-bag of Korean and Chinese actors, along with any Japanese-Americans who'd dodged the internment camps, plus anyone else who looks vaguely 'Asian.'  To reinforce the idea that the Chinese and their homeland were not so very different, Paramount chose the desert landscape of Arizona to stand in for the far-too-far-away-and-difficult-to-get-to-in-wartime China.
Now all it required was a real-life Caucasian American to lead the way and show them all how to hit back most effectively at the fiendish Japs. Enter pint-sized hero Alan Ladd as cynical tough-guy profiteer David Jones who doesn't give two hoots about right and wrong until he falls for the glacial beauty and compassion of ex-pat schoolteacher Carolyn Grant (Loretta Young) who needs his help to get her schoolgirls to safety.
Ladd plays his part like a schoolyard bully tamed by the love of a good woman, although quite what Miss Young's character sees in him is beyond me. He's immature with a flippant disregard for anything and anyone that gets in his way, and his conversion to good deeds is as unconvincing as the love which springs fully formed from nowhere to overwhelm the two of them. Ladd and Young have zero chemistry, and she expresses more (distasteful) emotion in rejecting sidekick William Bendix' marriage proposition than she ever manages when being wooed by Ladd.
Both as a piece of wartime propaganda and an entertainment CHINA is a flop. The stars don't click and the plot's a dud leaving the film with zero credibility in both categories. Most definitely one to avoid.