Bombs over Burma

 

Anna May Wong is a great actress and it's too bad that the racism of the day usually prevented her from getting more than supporting roles in A-movies (there are a few exceptions), she did get the lead role in occasional B-movies. PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), one of the Poverty Row studios, put her at the head of the cast of a 1942 war movie titled Bombs Over Burma. The rationale at PRC might have been purely business oriented--she was a name that would help sell the film on the Chinese market. That is speculation rather than objective fact, but in any case, a starring role is nonetheless a starring role.

She plays a Chinese school teacher named Lin Ying who also works as an espionage agent, helping in her own way to fight against the invading Japanese. Her mission in this film--find out what enemy agent is feeding the Japanese information about important supply convoys travelling along the Burma Road.

This mission put her on a bus driven by an American expatriate named Slim. Her fellow passengers are an eclectic group of Americans and Europeans. When a damaged bridge forces them to stop for the night at a Buddhist monastery, the situation grows dangerous.

Lin Ying discovers the monk who runs the monastery has a secret room with a short-wave radio, but there is an initial uncertainty about whose side he's on. Then there's a murder. False accusations abound and it looks like Lin Ying might get framed for being the enemy agent.

It turns out she's one step ahead of the bad guy the whole time, running a con on him to force him to give himself away and leading to his rather brutal demise.

Like all wartime films dealing with the war, it is propaganda. But that's not a bad thing. When Slim admits he stays in China because he was bullied growing up and now hates seeing China bullied--he calls the coolies working through the night to repair the bridge his blood brothers--it generates more honest emotion than we usually see in Poverty Row films. (For a modern viewer who knows that post-war China would be ruled by one of history's greatest mass murderers, there's unintended poignancy that the filmmakers could not have planned for in 1942.)

It's not a perfect film--even with a short 65-minute run time, there are a few times when scenes are dragged out too long. But the mystery behind the identity of the enemy agent is a reasonably good one and Anna May Wong gives an excellent and grounded performance. She was an actress who always deserved a chance to shine.

Here's the move on YouTube: