China Doll (1958)
A Great Adventure out of the desperate days of the Famous Flying Tigers !
American pilot Cliff Brandon, fighting the Japanese in China, finds himself the unintentional "owner" of a Chinese housekeeper, Shu-Jen. The unlikely couple falls in love and marries, but not without tragedy brought on by the war.
- Date of release
- 1958-06-06
- TMDB
- 6.9 / 10 (7)
- Runtime
- 1h 39m
- Genres
- Drama, Romance, War
- Director
- Frank Borzage
Casting
- Victor Mature — Capt. Cliff Brandon
- Li Li-Hua — Shu-Jen
- Ward Bond — Father Cairns
- Bob Mathias — Capt. Phil Gates
- Johnny Desmond — Sgt. Steve Hill
- Stuart Whitman — Lt. Dan O'Neill
- Elaine Devry — Alice Nichols
- Ann McCrea — Mona Perkins
- Danny Chang — Ellington
- Denver Pyle — Col. Wiley
- Don 'Red' Barry — MSgt. Hal Foster
- Tige Andrews — Cpl. Carlo Menotti
Interesting facts
China Doll is a 1958 romantic drama film set in the China Burma India theater of World War II and starring Victor Mature and Li Li-Hua. It represented a return to films for director Frank Borzage who had taken a 10-year hiatus.
Production
China Doll had lingered on Borzage's desk from 1953 as an earlier story, The China Story. Starting out with the working title of Time Is a Memory, the film was the first co-production of Batjac Productions and Romina Productions; the next and last co-production was Escort West (1959), a western, also starring Victor Mature.
Borzage had been a successful director throughout the 1920s and reached his peak in the late silent and early sound era with such noted films as Seventh Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928), Bad Girl (1931) and A Farewell to Arms (1932). During the 1940s, his films were not as well received and after the film noir, Moonrise (1948), Borzage had stopped directing.
The film was also known as Time is a Memory and shooting started August 15, 1957.
Borzage and Victor Mature intended China Doll to be the first of several films they would make together, others including The Incorrigibles and Vaults of Heaven.
Principal photography took place in 1958 with location shooting at Saugus, California. To faithfully recreate the Kunming Airfield, documentary footage from World War II was incorporated. Although aerial action in China Doll took a secondary role compared to the melodrama that predominated, the following aircraft were featured:
Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.
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