Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (US 1955)

Here’s a film that’s lovely to look at and features an ear-worm song cleverly stitched into the score by Alfred Newman. But in some ways it’s the production itself and the stories behind the script which make it a significant film. Let’s take the production first. It was released in August 1955 as one of the early Fox ‘CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color’ films. At this point, ‘Scope prints were still being released in their original 2.55:1 aspect ratio with a separate stereo soundtrack. The film must have looked and sounded fantastic – as long as you were in a big and refurbished Fox theatre. Director Henry King was nearly 70 when the film was released. He was arguably the most reliable director at 20th Century Fox, responsible for major features for nearly the whole of the studio period and completing over 100 films in his long career. King’s forte was literary adaptations but as soon as he finished work on this film, he started on Carousel (1956).

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is indeed a literary adaptation of the novel of the same title (but with British spelling) by Han Suyin. It is set in Hong Kong in 1949 as the Chinese Civil War is coming to an end and the Korean War is about to begin. One of the most striking aspects of the production is that much of the film was shot on location, offering some amazing coverage of the city, its waterfront and the hills above. The shooting of these scenes was the responsibility of Otto Lang who appears to have worked as a 2nd-unit director on several Fox productions. As far as I’m aware Leon Shamroy, like King, a Fox stalwart throughout the studio period, shot the whole film including the Hong Kong and California sequences (and the studio-set material). One of the concerns about early ‘Scope was the suggestion that the need for more light by the anamorphic lens would reduce the depth of field available and that the difficulties of composition would mean a reliance on relatively static medium shots. In this film Shamroy seems to deploy many long shots on the Hong Kong locations and even to some extent in the studio interiors. This is what makes the film so spectacular and a perfect advertisement for what ‘Scope could do. In many scenes he composes using the full width of the screen and includes several charcters in medium long shot (MLS).

The story is relatively simple. Han Suyin is a doctor specialising in paediatric medicine in a Hong Kong hospital. She’s a widow with an extended family in Chungking. She meets and falls in love with Mark Elliott, an American war correspondent. He is married but separated from his wife who lives in Singapore. Mark struggles to get a divorce and Suyin goes back to her family to get their approval for remarriage. With war still in China and coming to Korea, Mark could be sent to cover action at any point. Though they love each other Mark and Suyin know that because she is ‘Eurasian’ (that’s the term used in the film’ for a person with a European and an Asian parent) they are likely to face prejudice whether they are in East or West. Suyin faces prejudice at home in Chungking and in Hong Kong from the racist wife of the hospital’s funder.

The story behind the script is that it is highly auto-biographical. Surprisingly though, Han Suyin (1916-2012) became a supporter of the People’s Republic of China, even though her first husband died in 1947 fighting for the Nationalist Kuomintang. In reality she fell in love with an Australian journalist rather than an American. Presumably she still had some control over the material and it’s interesting to find a Cold War film (with memories of Korea only a few years earlier) in which the Chinese CP is not completely denounced. Suyin’s family in Chungking remind me a little of the household in Springtime in a Small Town (China 1948 and 2002) – much larger, but clearly affluent despite the Civil War. In the hospital in Hong Kong, one of the senior doctors who admires Suyin urges her to return to China and offer her services to the new government. The real Han Suyin did return to China and also later wrote a novel in support of the Chinese-led rebellion against colonial rule in Malaya (she had then married a British officer in Malaya).

The casting decisions on this production will prompt comment today. William Holden plays Mark Elliott and he’s always reliable actor. He seems to have caused a stir in Hong Kong since the fandom that he provoked is a feature of the classic Hong Kong film Comrades: Almost a Love Story (HK 1996) in which Aunt Rosie, one of the older female characters, claims to have spent the day with Holden in his hotel during the shoot of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. The same actor who plays Aunt Rosie (Irene Tsu) supposedly had an uncredited part in William Holden’s other (British) picture made in Hong Kong, The World of Suzie Wong (1961). The controversial casting might now be seen as Jennifer Jones to play Han Suyin. As a bi-racial character I’m not sure how that casting would be seen today. Is it a case of ‘yellow-face’ casting – a Caucasian actor playing a bi-racial character? Chinese actors, including Chinese-American actors were severely under-represented in Studio Hollywood films. Jennifer Jones had form in this regard. In 1946 she starred opposite Gregory Peck and Joseph Cotten in (her husband) David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun (popularly known as ‘Lust in the Dust’) in which she played a bi-racial character as a ‘mestiza‘ – with Caucasian and Native-American parents. Jennifer Jones is convincingly made-up and has the poise to carry the costumes as Han Suyin – but of course that in no way detracts from the arguments about how such casting decisions should be undertaken today. Both Jones and Holden are convincing in their roles and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is a romance well worth watching.