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Matt Glasby

This is the latest instalment in a feature series reflecting on instances of East meets West in world cinema, including China-US co-productions.
Film history can be cruel, but it sometimes performs kindnesses too. For all the long-ignored classics waiting to be rediscovered, there are some that deserve to be lost.
Set in Hong Kong in 1949, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) is a big-budget Hollywood romance starring Jennifer Jones (The Song of Bernadette) and William Holden (Sunset Boulevard).
Based on an autobiographical novel by Han Suyin and directed by veteran Henry King, it tells of the forbidden, culture-clash love between widowed Eurasian doctor Suyin (Jones) and married American journalist Mark Elliot (Holden), which plays out against the anxious backdrop of the Chinese Civil War.


The film made an impressive US$4 million at the box office upon release and was nominated for eight Oscars, including best actress and best picture. It won three, including a deserving best song for Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster’s soaring love theme.
Over the years, however, the film’s sheen has faded. It is easy to see why.
Jones was a talented actor with a strong screen presence, but casting a Caucasian as a Eurasian character was unwise, if not downright unforgivable.
To put the decision in context, the studio system was – and arguably is – institutionally racist and Flower Drum Song, the first Hollywood film featuring Asian leads, would not come out until 1961.
Exploring the Eurasian experience through such a lens should never have been attempted and could never have worked, even with a sensitive touch – something sorely lacking from John Patrick’s clunky script.

Heavily made up and dressed in a cheongsam, Jones wanders about spouting tone-deaf generalisations about race, such as, “I’m Eurasian, the word itself seems to suggest a certain moral laxity in the minds of some people.”
Although her character is a doctor helping poor locals and rich expats, Suyin is either patronised or objectified depending on the scene. When she and Elliot disembark a plane, they are reminded to take all their possessions. “That means you,” he leers at her.
The indignities do not end there. Suyin’s half-sister, Suchen, who Suyin visits in Chongqing, is played by Caucasian actor Donna Martell. Later, we meet a “Chinese” fortune-teller played by another Caucasian, Leonard Strong, in full yellowface make-up with an exaggerated accent and repellent money-grabbing manner.
The secondary Chinese characters, although at least played by Asian actors, are invariably meek and downtrodden, just window dressing to the melodramas of the main players.

At least the locations are – mostly – authentic. Second-unit director Otto Lang had the opportunity to film in Hong Kong for two weeks, with the script rewritten to accommodate his footage.
The Foreign Correspondents Club on Conduit Road becomes Suyin’s hospital, and we see the couple driving through the crowded Hong Kong streets for a date at the Tai Pak Floating Restaurant. Ironically, the beautiful hilltop where Suyin proclaims Hong Kong “the hoard of a jewel thief” is actually in California.
There are some incisive observations about entitled expat behaviour. Isobel Elsom almost walks off with the entire film as the awful snob Mrs Palmer-Jones: “Why anyone would want to live anywhere but Hong Kong I can’t understand,” she trills. “Where else in the world could you get 10 servants for the price of one?”
Even if viewers forgive the film – a big “if” under the circumstances – the central romance completely fails to land. Elliot is an obnoxious journalist who repeatedly pesters Suyin for a date until she caves in and agrees. Once he has wined and dined her, however, she falls inexplicably in love with him and becomes almost wholly passive.
“I will always do what you want me to,” she says, in one of many love scenes that are damper than the South China Sea.

Part of this failure might be down to that Holden and Jones hated each other. He considered her rude and obsessed with her make-up, which she said made her look old, and even claimed she ate garlic to put him off before their love scenes.
History has not recorded Jones’ side, but we know enough about how powerful men bad-mouth their female co-stars to suspect she might have had plenty to say in return.
We will never know. And perhaps relics like this should stay buried with their prejudices.
“Oh Suzanne,” Suyin tells her friend (Jorja Curtright, another Caucasian actor), “you should be proud to be Eurasian!”
“Nonsense,” Suzanne counters, “you can’t be two things at once.”
But this dull, dated movie proves you can – in managing to be offensive and eminently forgettable all at once.
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Film & TV

It won three Oscars but the clunky 1955 movie casts Caucasians as Eurasians, features yellowface and had two leads who hated each other


It won three Oscars but the clunky 1955 movie casts Caucasians as Eurasians, features yellowface and had two leads who hated each other.
