You know somehow that things will not go smoothly, and they don't, though the plot is oddly prosaic at times. Han Suyin (a widow) says to Elliott, after he wonders why she'd go out with a married man, "I thought if you were happily married there could be no danger, and if you weren't it could make no difference." And it begins there, freighted with desire and worry. As the affair begins between our leads, Dr. Han Suyin (Jones was actually an Oklahoma girl), but this is what Hollywood was still demanding of its casts, afraid to diversify. It might be a surprise that Jones plays a Chinese doctor (Eurasian, officially), Dr. If you can not worry about how "good" the movie is or what it could have been (compared to others, or just on it's own formal terms), it's a vivid, engrossing, politically loaded situation with two charming and beautiful actors. There, all my reservations are out of the way. The events are set in Hong Kong and that's part of the visual charm, but it's also a distraction for the filmmakers, drifting (just slightly at times) into a travelogue. The filming is wide screen saturated color in that first two years of this kind of spectacle, and like other films of the mid-fifties it falls victim to being pretty at times. This is a love story set against a new kind of wartime, leading eventually to the Korean War, and there is nothing better for a movie than love and war. William Holden, at the height of his fame, holds his own in his restrained and slightly diffident way, and Jennifer Jones is forceful and believable and likable, if a hair too mannered for my taste and too frankly lovely for the good of the movie. One reason it was a hit was it was deeply romantic and epic and yet dealing with a vividly disturbing issue for Americans, the take over of China by Communist rule. Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) This should have been could have been terrific, and it won five (five!) Academy awards, including for it's now more famous title song.
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