Rapimento e riscatto

Maureen O'Hara stars in a movie where her husband gets kidnapped those damn commies in South East Asia so she hires tough and dashing soldier of fortune Clark Gable to save the day

That's not the cast or the location of PROOF OF LIFE but it does have a very similar plot . Did someone mention this was a 1940s matinée blockbuster ? Just curious because while I was watching the movie I was struck by how old fashioned everything felt . Russell Crowe plays an Aussie who served in the SAS and saves a Frenchman from the Chechens in the opening sequence , but you could have had Gable playing an American paratrooper saving someone from the Red Army on the River Elbe in May 1945 . Different actor , different period of history , different enemy but still the same basic story with the action switching from Europe to say South East Asia in 1950

That's not to say PROOF OF LIFE is a bad film . It's not and I found it mainly entertaining though perhaps a little too long . It's just that it is so old fashioned that you can see where the predictable story threads are going to begin and end . You can't deny that both the cast and action scenes are good , it's just that you also can't stop thinking it would have been better if it'd been filmed in monochrome and directed by Michael Curtiz with no bad language or sexual references