GHOST OF THE CHINA SEA (1958)

Luzon, 1941. The people of the Philippines are "pretending to be at peace" even as the Japanese are carrying out a drawn out invasion. Justine Woolf runs a plantation that she is unwilling to leave despite supply disruptions, distant bombing rumbles, and warnings from both Rev. Edwards and her hired hand, the cynical Martin French. But eventually, Japanese planes strafe her fields, killing many workers and causing the rest to leave, with only Edwards, French and her part Japanese bookkeeper Hito remaining. They escape into the jungle and, though briefly captured, are freed by American sailor Larry Peters, whom French assumes is a deserter. Nevertheless, they follow Peters to a seized but damaged Filipino boat Peters calls the U.S.S. Frankenstein. They set sail looking for an island refuge, along the way picking up fuel and guns and a handful of freedom fighters. French is a fairly obnoxious bully who always thinks everyone else is in the wrong, but through Justine, we come to see him as a damaged and conflicted soul and he slowly comes to trust others. The main conflict in the group, between Edwards and French, concerns the act of killing—Edwards preaches against it but French sees it as a necessity. After a number of small skirmishes, our survivors end up a sure target for a Japanese ship, and they'll need a miracle (or the American Navy) to get out alive.

Though I’d never seen this movie, it felt very familiar to me, and I realized later that it's a lot like BATTLE AT BLOODY BEACH, an Audie Murphy war adventure made a couple of years later. One subgenre of war movies, cheaper to make than large-scale battleground movies, involves a small group of people, sometimes soldiers, sometimes civilians (and sometimes a mix of both), making their way past enemy soldiers to arrive at safety. These two movies are good examples, both made with B-movie budgets several years after the war, and both fostering a bit more in the way of character development than is possible in the films with a wider scope. This movie is nothing special but still worth watching. Location shooting in Hawaii is helpful, though honestly some of it still looks like studio work. The acting is average. David Brian, a familiar character actor who specialized in westerns and melodramas, gives a one-note performance in what is, to be fair, a one-note role as French. Lynette Bernay (Justine) and Noman Wright (Rev. Edwards) are bland in their stereotypical parts. Jonathan Haze (Peters) is a notch better, giving his sailor character some personality. Poor Wright is given to dimestore philosophizing. At one point, he talks about needing "corners and shadows in which to think" and later describes their plight as that of being "phantoms on a spectral ship, tracking the moon through the river of time, [becoming] a ghost of the China Sea." The movie could have used either more or less of that kind of semi-poetic atmosphere. Pictured above are Brian and Bernay with an unidentified actor to their left. [YouTube]