Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

This should have been could have been terrific, and it won five (five!) Academy awards, including for it's now more famous title song. One reason it was a hit was it was deeply romantic and epic and yet dealing with a vividly disturbing issue for Americans, the take over of China by Communist rule.

William Holden, at the height of his fame, holds his own in his restrained and slightly diffident way, and Jennifer Jones is forceful and believable and likable, if a hair too mannered for my taste and too frankly lovely for the good of the movie. This is a love story set against a new kind of wartime, leading eventually to the Korean War, and there is nothing better for a movie than love and war. Ask Tolstoy. The filming is wide screen saturated color in that first two years of this kind of spectacle, and like other films of the mid-fifties it falls victim to being pretty at times. The events are set in Hong Kong and that's part of the visual charm, but it's also a distraction for the filmmakers, drifting (just slightly at times) into a travelogue.

There, all my reservations are out of the way. If you can not worry about how "good" the movie is or what it could have been (compared to others, or just on it's own formal terms), it's a vivid, engrossing, politically loaded situation with two charming and beautiful actors. It might be a surprise that Jones plays a Chinese doctor (Eurasian, officially), Dr. Han Suyin (Jones was actually an Oklahoma girl), but this is what Hollywood was still demanding of its casts, afraid to diversify. And depending on star power to succeed. Holden plays Mark Elliott, a journalist.

As the affair begins between our leads, Dr. Han Suyin (a widow) says to Elliott, after he wonders why she'd go out with a married man, "I thought if you were happily married there could be no danger, and if you weren't it could make no difference." And it begins there, freighted with desire and worry. You know somehow that things will not go smoothly, and they don't, though the plot is oddly prosaic at times. It's partly the script, but also, oddly enough, the filming, with a very static camera (which sits and waits as the actors talk, beautiful backdrops and all). I think Jones and Holden are "creditable" in their roles, a good word because it's so awkward and awful.

One thing that happened for me, in 2011, was getting washed in nostalgia. It's a movie about falling in love as the world is spinning out of control around you. It's before cell phones and constant news--so some of the best scenes are out of touch with everything in the world except the two of them. The music swells, the sun hits the blue waters in the bay, and it seems like a huge escape. I suppose that's what it was for them, from their histories, from their obligations. Eventually the world caught up, however, and things unravel.

Another great thing about the movie, however old-fashioned the approach might seem, is the racial conflicts at work, for and against them. It is maybe the big theme of the movie, when all is said and done. This is a tear jerker of the largest magnitude. Soak it up.