BY FRED BLOSSER
Today,
moviegoers who want to immerse themselves in two hours of bittersweet romantic
misery are likely to go see “The Fault in Our Stars,†“If I Stay,†or “The Best
of Me.†In 1955, the comparable ticket
was “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,†based on Han Suyin’s bestselling 1952
book. Thanks to Twilight Time’s
limited-edition Blu-ray of the 20th
Century Fox film, today’s devotees of Nicholas Sparks and John Green have an
opportunity to see what made their grandmothers cry as twenty-somethings in the
Eisenhower era, while veteran fans of, uh, more mature age can enjoy Han’s
tragic love story again in beautiful hi-def CinemaScope and Color by DeLuxe.
Han’s
fictionalized memoir related the story of her love affair with a war
correspondent, whom she called Mark Elliott, in 1949 Hong Kong. The circumstances of the affair were
provocative for the time. The widowed
Han, a medical resident at the crown colony’s Victoria Hospital, had mixed-race
parentage (Chinese father, Belgian mother). Elliott was a married American, although the marriage was strained and
he and his wife lived apart. How times
have changed, in real life as in the movies. In 2014, neither the one partner’s race nor the other’s marital status
would pose much of a challenge in most social circles. If you’re a 20-year-old viewer today, you may
have to check your instinct to judge the story by those more tolerant
standards, in which race isn’t a game-changer at all. Nowadays, in the rare event that a cultural
difference between lovers is needed as a dramatic complication in a movie or TV
show, it’s likely to be expressed in terms of supernatural fantasy, not
race. By that measure, you may care that
one partner is human and the other is a vampire. But that one sweetheart is part Asian and the
other Caucasian? Not so much.
Another
convention of the time isn’t merely irrelevant in today’s ethnically diverse
cinema -- it’s embarrassing. In the
movie, Suyin is played by a fully Caucasian actress, Jennifer Jones, who
doesn’t look particularly Asian, even with make-up. Suyin has a younger sister in China, Suchin,
played by Donna Martell, who appears even less Asian than Jones. A friend in Hong Kong also of mixed
parentage, Suzanne, portrayed by Jorja Curtright, looks less Asian yet. There are plenty of Asian actors in the film,
including such familiar and welcome faces as Richard Loo, Philip Ahn, Beulah
Quo, and James Hong, but they’re relegated to supporting roles. It’s true that the movie could hardly have
been green-lighted as a major production in 1955 without a star like Jones in
top-billing, and that Asian actresses with that sort of clout were non-existent
then. But still. Jones also tends to play her scenes in
somewhat stilted, old-school style, yet another thing that today’s younger
viewers may have to adjust to. William
Holden, at the top of his game as Mark, brings a more relaxed method of acting,
but even his dialogue becomes a little pompous at times: “That reminds me of a line in that poem by
Thompson ...â€
20th
Century Fox dressed up the movie with all the amenities that A-picture budgets
could provide in 1955. These values remain
impressive almost 60 years later: a stirring score by Alfred Newman, which also
yielded the hit title song as a chart-topper by the Four Aces (another sign of
changing times -- can you imagine the Four Aces on the 2014 charts alongside
Robin Thicke and Jay Z?), exotic on-location exterior shots in Hong Kong, and
ravishing color design. The Twilight
Time Blu-ray, limited to 3,000 units, includes a sharp 1080p transfer, an
isolated music track, a souvenir booklet by Julie Kirgo, and a fine commentary
track by Jon Burlingame, Michael Lonzo, and Sylvia Stoddard. Fox Movietone News clips from 1955 show
Holden and producer Buddy Adler accepting honors at a couple of industry award
ceremonies, reminding us that Hollywood loved to celebrate itself long before
“Entertainment Tonight†and “Access Hollywood†came along.
The
Twilight Time Blu-ray limited edition of “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing†can
be ordered HERE.