This is better than Edward Dmytryk's other Chinese film of the same year from Hongkong, "Soldier of Fortune". Here is another soldier of fortune but of an opposite kind. Humphrey Bogart as a Catholic priest lands in a village somewhere between Sinkiang and Tibet among the mountains, where there is a bandit gang threatening the villages under the chieftain Lee J. Cobb, the perfect crook in all his films. It seems that Cobb and Humphrey have met before, and the best scenes are between these two men, very opposite but matching each other perfectly.
Gene Tierney is the nurse in the village who has the misfortune of falling in love with her priest, while E.G.Marshall makes one of his best performances as the village doctor, married to the equally stalwart Agnes Moorehead, the greatest realist in the film. The villagers also play an important part, the school children, the patients, the local whore-house, the elder of the village - like in "Soldier of Fortune" the ethnic panorama here is of major interest.
The backbone of the film though is the fantastic story. Humphrey plays one of his most complex and intriguing characters and does it more than well in perhaps his last real film and one of his very few in colour. The village is not only threatened by bandits and the civil war of China, (this is 1947), but also by the impending possibility that the mission has to be abandoned. E.G.Marshall and Bogart have many arguments about this. and they are never agreed.
The conclusion is inevitable, and although it's not a happy end it is in a way most satisfactory. It was after all the best of all possible endings.
It's a beautiful film and one of Dmytryk's best. You recognize some of the arguments from "The End of the Affair" where God also played some part, but here he does not intrude, although he is used, but it is rather more common and rational sense that has the last word here than any theology, which actually is better done without.
Gene Tierney is the nurse in the village who has the misfortune of falling in love with her priest, while E.G.Marshall makes one of his best performances as the village doctor, married to the equally stalwart Agnes Moorehead, the greatest realist in the film. The villagers also play an important part, the school children, the patients, the local whore-house, the elder of the village - like in "Soldier of Fortune" the ethnic panorama here is of major interest.
The backbone of the film though is the fantastic story. Humphrey plays one of his most complex and intriguing characters and does it more than well in perhaps his last real film and one of his very few in colour. The village is not only threatened by bandits and the civil war of China, (this is 1947), but also by the impending possibility that the mission has to be abandoned. E.G.Marshall and Bogart have many arguments about this. and they are never agreed.
The conclusion is inevitable, and although it's not a happy end it is in a way most satisfactory. It was after all the best of all possible endings.
It's a beautiful film and one of Dmytryk's best. You recognize some of the arguments from "The End of the Affair" where God also played some part, but here he does not intrude, although he is used, but it is rather more common and rational sense that has the last word here than any theology, which actually is better done without.