China Doll

"Shut it off and be happy on your own time." American pilot Cliff Brandon (Victor Mature) is getting demoralized flying missions supplying the Chinese against the Japanese in WWII. One night, after imbibing a more than healthy amount of booze, he misunderstands an offer on…

Jesse Snoddon

Big pile of tear-jerking, propagandistic hooey from Frank Borzage trying to make a comeback after a decade-long hiatus. The kind of WWII movie in which the Yanks only want to help destitute locals, supply the guerillas and do other good deeds while the evil commies wantonly…

D Rock

China Doll is another of those typical late 1950's WWII films that feature a romance between an American Serviceman and a civilian from another culture. Produced by John Wayne's Batjac Productions, this film set in 1943 China, has Victor Mature doing his best not to fall in…

Andy Summers 🤠

Some Sternberg, some Hawks, but Mature slowly falling in love is pure Borzage. It is a fascinating movie because of how strangely all the spare parts hang together, but I wish the love story felt more central to it. China Doll is limited some also by Mature, who by 1958 had…

Filipe Furtado

Thematically dubious, hopelessly stagey Director Frank Borzage’s 1958 release “China Doll” tries hard to tug at American heart strings with its WWll take on fly boy Captain Cliff Brandon’s  (Victor Mature) involvement with a young woman of Chinese heritage, Shu-Jen (Li…

RivoliPalace

To save the village it may be necessary to destroy the village. Borzage's homegrown transcendentalist-theosophist-freemasonry thing is too much a 19th century construct to address the complexities of global power in the latter half of the 20th, but if you put all the…

Lencho of the Apes

Li Li-hua, whenever in propaganda films like Noroshi wa Shanghai ni Agaru (1944, Hiroshi Inagaki and Yue Feng) and here (the marriage between Li and Victor Mature's character clearly symbolises the free allies of the US and Taiwan in the free world, and their daughter was…

Jessica Yeung

Part of my 5 Directors x 5 Unseen Films (11) challenge. Okay, I'll admit it. This heavily melodramatic WWII drama from director Frank Borgaze got me to tear up at the end. It just pulls at your heartstrings and won't let go. And yes, I'm a sucker for cross-cultural…

TajLV

Love as something that blossoms from the eyes, not the mouth. A war film by someone who hated war movies so much that he actually makes a romance with the material, drenched in both melancholy and humor. Only Borzage would be able to make love blossom from such a vicious…

Diogo Serafim