Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

User Rating:

6.6/10   

Director:

Henry King

Writers:

John Patrick (screenplay)
Han Suyin (novel)

Release Date:

26 September 1955 (Sweden)

Genre:

Biography | Drama | Romance | War

Tagline:

The price they pay when they come out of their secret garden and face the world in modern-day Hong Kong - makes this one of the screen's unforgettable experiences!

Plot:

A widowed doctor of both Chinese and European descent falls in love with a married American correspondent in Hong Kong during China's Communist revolution.

Plot Keywords:

Love | Doctor | Hong Kong | Separated | Chinese Civil War

Awards:

Won 3 Oscars. Another 2 wins & 5 nominations

Cast

William Holden	...	Mark Elliott
Jennifer Jones	...	Dr. Han Suyin
Torin Thatcher	...	Humphrey Palmer-Jones
Isobel Elsom	...	Adeline Palmer-Jones
Murray Matheson	...	Dr. John Keith
Virginia Gregg	...	Anne Richards
Richard Loo	...	Robert Hung
Soo Yong	...	Nora Hung
Philip Ahn	...	Third Uncle
Jorja Curtright	...	Suzanne
Donna Martell	...	Suchen, Suyin's sister

Runtime:

102 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Mandarin

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.55 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording) (optical prints) | 4-Track Stereo (Western Electric Recording) (magnetic prints)

Certification:

Australia:G (DVD rating) | Netherlands:AL | West Germany:12 (f) | USA:Approved (certificate #17475) | Canada:PG (video rating) | Australia:PG | Finland:S | Sweden:Btl | UK:U

Filming Locations:

20th Century Fox Studios - 10201 Pico Blvd., Century City, Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Trivia:

Jennifer Jones reportedly chewed garlic cloves before her love scenes with William Holden to deter her notoriously womanizing co-star.

Goofs:

Crew or equipment visible: When the orderly comes to get Dr. Han in the operating room at the beginning of the movie, one of the members of the film crew (a man wearing glasses) can be seen reflected in the window of the right-hand door to the O.R.

Quotes:

Dr. Han Suyin: Our gorgeous lie did not even last the night.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Grease (1978)

Soundtrack:

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

Poignant Doomed Romance

"Love is a Many-Splendored Thing" is set in Hong Kong in 1949-50, and tells the story of the relationship between Mark Elliott, a white American journalist, and Han Suyin, a half-Chinese half-European doctor. This story of a mixed-race love affair was quite a daring theme for the fifties, and, as it often did, Hollywood tried to soften the blow by casting a white actress as the supposedly non-Caucasian woman who falls in love with a white man, something that would be regarded as politically incorrect today but was quite acceptable then.. (Think, for example, of the casting of Ava Gardner in "Show Boat" or Natalie Wood in "West Side Story") The setting of the story in a British colony was also perhaps a way of exploring racial issues in a way that would cause less controversy in America. Suyin loses her job in a Hong Kong hospital because her British superiors take exception to the fact that she is dating a white man, whom she is unable to marry because his estranged wife will not grant him a divorce. As was sometimes the case, European colonialism was made the whipping-boy for some of America's own failings. Imagine the furore that would have been unleashed had a similar film been made about a black or mixed-race woman doctor in a hospital in Alabama.

Besides racial issues, the film also raises questions of international politics, referring to both the Communist seizure of power in China and the outbreak of the Korean War. Han Suyin was a real person and a well-known author of the period; in reality she tended to support Mao's Communist regime, but here she is shown as firmly anti-Communist. This is not, however, primarily an "issue" movie about either racialism or politics, but rather a romance, a good example of what would have been known at the time as a "woman's picture". Such films, although mostly made by male directors, were mostly aimed at female audiences. They dealt with love and romance- often unhappy romance- from the woman's point of view, and had a strong female character in the leading role. The genre often provided roles for actresses older than the heroines of standard romances. Earlier examples were normally in monochrome, but by the fifties they generally, as here, used lush, sumptuous colour.

Although a Chinese or Eurasian actress would have been more convincing in the role, Jennifer Jones, does a very good job as Suyin. I found William Holden, as Mark, rather uncharismatic, but this does not matter much as Suyin is very much the dominant figure. She is screen much more than Mark, and the film examines her family and professional life much more than it does his. Although Jennifer was still strikingly beautiful, she was in her mid-thirties, rather older than most romantic heroines of films of this period. Holden was about the same age, unusually for the fifties when "boy-meets-girl" often meant "older man meets girl".

The film is not particularly profound, but is well-made with some attractive photography, particularly of Hong Kong itself, reflecting the growing trend in the fifties for shooting on location rather than on studio sets. Seldom can Hong Kong have looked so beautiful; the view from a hill overlooking the city takes on a special meaning, as this is where Suyin and Mark go for their romantic assignments. The overall mood is one of poignant, doomed romance, a mood heightened by the atmospheric photography and the musical score, including one of the most memorable movie themes ever written. 7/10