La colline de l'adieu

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.

In the book The Films of William Holden, the author says the film does not wear well and its popularity is due to the hit title song from the film that you could not get away from hearing in 1955. How well I remember, though I was only eight years old back then. I disagree, the film is a tremendous romance for those who like that and the location photography in Hong Kong is fabulous.

A few things struck me. Since Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr had their famous romantic swimming scene in From Here to Eternity, I think that Harry Cohn was trying to one up Darryl Zanuck with having Bill Holden and Jennifer Jones do the same.

I also think and I could cite other film examples from 20th Century Fox that Zanuck acquired the film rights for the original novel with Tyrone Power in mind for the male lead. Holden is fine in the part, but try and picture Power in it. Not to mention the fact that Power's favorite director Henry King is at the helm.

But it is true that the song is the real star of the film. It really carries the romantic plot along. One of the great examples of the right music making a good film.

Ironically both the stars dealt with a lot of heartache in their lives. Holden with his alcoholism and Jones with the various marriages and deaths of people close to her. But when you see them high on that windy hill in Hong Kong they are a pair of the most romantic lovers ever filmed.

RIP Bill Holden and Jennifer Jones. Both of you dealt with so much bad karma in your lives.

... in my opinion, of course. There are films that come close-- An Affair To Remember, Rome Holiday, and several others. But for sheer appeal to die-hard romantics like myself, Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing is the absolute pinnacle. It qualifies as a "perfect" romantic vehicle in my mind because of it's perfection in all areas of the cinematic art-- story, script, location, acting, even in it's controversial subject matter, illicit love. But in the capable hands of William Holden and Jennifer Jones (a truly inspired bit of casting), both still in the prime of their careers, it became a thing of beauty forever. In fact, one totally forgets the racial context of their love affair, leaving only the passion and romance. I even loved the theme song, which like the film itself, has become a romantic standard over the many decades since it was made. This was the first movie that made me cry like a baby, the dramatic emotional impact in my life, totally unforgettable. This epic film, exploring everything from racism to the the horrific toll of war, is one for the ages.

This film immediately catches the eye, with the atmospheric aerial views of a very pretty Hong Hong. Filmed in those rich colours of 1950 films which modern blockbusters never seem to capture. Probably a sign of those times, because this is not a high powered, seen it all before film, full of havoc and violence. The havoc and violence are there though, in the backdrop, with thousands of refugees trying to get out of China This is a very moving and compelling story, full of hope and love in a tragic time, in recent history. The story of two people from different cultures falling in love. And the build up to them trying to overcome this is at the heart of this very fine and moving film.

Based on the 1952 autobiography "A Many-Splendoured Thing," "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" (1955) tells the story of Han Suyin, focusing on the romance that Han, a widowed Eurasian doctor in 1949 Hong Kong, had with a married American correspondent named Mark Elliott. "I don't want to feel anything again, ever," Han tells Mark soon after they meet, but the two soon develop the mutual irresistibles for each other, and who can blame them? Mark is played by William Holden at the near peak of his hunky-dude period (the following year's "Picnic" would be the peak) in this, the first of three films over the next seven years that would find Holden in China (1960's "The World of Suzie Wong" and 1962's "Satan Never Sleeps" being the others). And Dr. Han is here played by Jennifer Jones, who, although not a Eurasian (unlike yummy Nancy Kwan and pretty France Nuyen of those other exotic Holden films), does a credible job of passing as one. Whether dressed in cheongsam, European frock, surgical gown or (hubba-hubba!) bathing suit, Jones looks ridiculously gorgeous here. No wonder East meets West in this film so dramatically! With its two appealing lead stars, breathtaking Hong Kong scenery, beautiful CinemaScope and color, Oscar-winning costumes and that classic, Oscar-winning title song that wafts through the film like a lovely incense, "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" turns out to be quite the winning and romantic concoction. Han herself supposedly did not care for the picture, so I can only imagine that great liberties were taken with her source material. Still, I enjoyed it. And if the film's ending causes a tear to come to the eye, just remember Mark's words of wisdom: "Life's greatest tragedy is not to be loved."