Visa pour Hong Kong

Apparently this film did very badly at the box office, yet in time it may be regarded with the same nostalgia as the all time classics. It has a top class cast and is much underrated. Well worth watching again and again.

After boy-genius Orson Welles gave us his debut masterpiece `Citizen Kane', followed it up with the wonderful `Magnificent Ambersons'(and who could forget his charismatic Harry Lime in Carol Reed's `Third Man'?) he really had nowhere to go except down.

But I never expected to see him as he is in `Ferry to Hong Kong' mugging and pulling faces to try to produce cheap laughs in an awful English accent. He even waddles around at one stage with a board strapped to his back, all dignity gone. To paraphrase a well-known script-writer from Stratford `When great Orson fell, what a fall was there!'

Otherwise this is a pretty poor attempt at a comedy with perhaps some interest for those who want to see ever-changing Hong Kong as it was in the late Fifties.

I wish I hadn't seen `Ferry to Hong Kong'

An interesting premise, somewhere between "Casablanca" and Suzie Wong, with name-brand actors. But this wound up as a weak period piece redeemed by a few (very few) clever moments and many nice background shots of Hong Kong as it was. Not many mid-20th-century films produced in the West with Hong Kong themes are available on DVD or video (at least we have "World of Suzie Wong") and fewer still had actual Hong Kong locations, so I am not disappointed in the film. Otherwise, it's a watchable "B" movie with Orson Welles as a bonus.

Lewis Gilbert, who directed three passable James Bond vehicles (YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, MOONRAKER, and THE SPY WHO LOVED ME) must have been wet behind the ears when he directed FERRY TO HONG KONG... and with Orson Welles as captain of the good ship Fat Annie in the cast!

Curt Jurgens, a German-born thespian of some quality and fame in the 1950s and 1960s, plays the dashing drunk and disheveled hero who wants to beat the dragon, encouraged to that end by exceedingly beautiful Sylvia Sims.

With some fisticuffs, fights, and blows over the head delivered by a fast fattening Welles, ably aided by fast aging Jurgens with pirates and criminals as targets, you see poor Fat Annie bubble down and sink in Kowloon Bay off then British colony Hong Kong, with some memorable sunset shots (could it be symbolic of the sun setting on the British Empire?)

If this crit makes no sense to you, the plot made no sense to me either, and it drags on for an interminable 111 minutes. I will NOT watch it again.

Absolutely fantastic film with three greats at the top of their game The legend Noel Purcell, Jurgens & Wells as two opposites or are they are excellently cast.

Wells English accent & comedy timing is very good, shame he didn't do more comedy, Jurgens is just pure class as the black sheep rouge

Amazing action sets the wonderful cast crew locations are a gem of its time well worth a watch and beautiful Sylvia Syms always a treat