Hong Kong

Not a great film in its own right but it certainly was responsible for a later greater franchise of films starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark. A brief checklist proves the point: fedora and leather jacket wearing hero that is a good, all action guy but sometimes strays into morally grey areas? Check. His name is Jeff Williams but his love interest comes from Indiana, so substitute another Welsh name for his surname and add a bit of geography and we have Indiana Jones. An orphaned oriental boy as his sidekick? Check. A feisty heroine and romantic interest that joins him on his adventures? Check. Dastardly foreign villains? Check. A sought after golden statuette? Check. A plane running out of fuel that is forced to 'crash' land? Check. Actually this is a fun little film and largely because of noting all these influences and Director/co-writer Lewis R Foster was no slouch having directed a number of early, classic shorts starring Laurel and Hardy. Ronald Reagan and Rhonda Fleming in the leads are both likeable and have decent chemistry together and Nigel Bruce and Mary Somerville, as an older upper crust couple and Claud Allister as a beleaguered Hotel manager, all add moments of welcome, gentle comedy. As it is set in Hong Kong, we would expect to see a number of Asian actors in prominent roles but that is not really the case. Danny Chang is the moppet, Wei Lin who adds heart to the story and Marvin Miller is a suitably oily Eastern bad guy. But the stakes never feel particularly high and it relies too much on obviously stock footage. That said, it passes an hour and a half of time agreeably enough.

Still with Warner Brothers, Ronald Reagan was now allowed to make outside films and he signed with Paramount again to do Hong Kong with their B picture unit headed by William Pine and William Thomas. He had done his first outside picture and his first western with these two guys and liked the experience. And he no doubt liked his leading lady Rhonda Fleming as they did well on screen together and their politics were completely in sync. He did four films with Fleming all told.

This one as the title says takes place in Hong Kong as Reagan and Fleming and a bunch of refugees arrive there fleeing from the new Communist government. Reagan is your basic soldier of fortune who saw his war surplus selling business go belly up with the new rulers in China. Fleming is the daughter of a missionary. Among others they have in tow is little Danny Chang a young orphan who has a gold statue encrusted with some jewels of a Buddha. The kind of statue that would make Sydney Greenstreet envious.

Reagan figures to make some good money selling this item and his Sydney Greenstreet turns out to be Marvin Miller. And Miller is a ruthless as Caspar Guttman in obtaining what he wants.

Reagan thinks he wants money, but he's tamed by the love of a good woman and an innocent child. Definitely something we've seen before.

Still this is a nice well made action picture in the Pine-Thomas tradition. Throughout the film Reagan sports a fedora that looks like something that might have inspired the creators of Indiana Jones and those films. It fits him and his character like the fedora on Harrison Ford's head.

Reagan would make one more film with Pine-Thomas and again it was with Rhonda Fleming. They made a good screen couple, too bad he didn't work with her over at Warner Brothers in his prime years.

His prime years as a player that is.

If you're wondering where Indiana Jones came from, here it is. The picture starts off with an American adventurer on a cargo plane in China, a husky, middle-aged Irish-American brunette. He's wearing a brown leather pilot's jacket and a matching fedora, and finds a young Chinese boy stowing away behind some cargo. Except for the extravagant action shots, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom follows the Reagan plot more or less perfectly for the first twenty minutes. I wonder if it was a deliberate rip-off on the part of Spielberg, or a subconscious "homage"?

After that, it's a reasonably pleasant 1950's spy thriller, with the good guy holding off the insidious red menace until the next time, saving both the foxy damsel in distress and the cute little Chinese boy.

A fun watch in and of itself, typical of the times and genre, and interesting as a bit of history, a probably unwitting building block for one of Hollywood's best known series.

Ronald Reagan is teamed with with Rhonda Flemming in this a movie about a jeweled statue during the Chinese war. Reagan gives a fairly wooden performance as the criminal that has a change of heart. I

I did like the fact that it was in color and some of the Hong Kong exterior street scenes appeared to have been done in a studio. It is listed as filmed on location such as the boat scenes.

Reagan wears a leather jacket and Fedora hat that made Harrison Ford famous in the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

If you are fond of the Paramount adventures movies, and there are plenty of them, directed by the likes of Lewis Foster, Edward Ludwig, Jerry Hopper...this one is realy a waste. Ok, there is the atmosphere and the presence of the glamorous, gorgeous Rhonda Fleming, but the story is so lame and predictable. This is the worst of Lewis Foster for me, concerning his adventures yarns. His best was CROSSWINDS, but this one.... It deserves to be watched for a movie buff searching gems from the fifties. So, if you try it, please do it only for the atmosphere. It remains a good time waster. Paramount Pictures usually provided good stuff.