Customer Reviews

Blood Alley

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

John Wayne has his hands full in this one. He plays an American sea captain captured by the Red Chinese and held for the crime of not being a communist. While he sits rotting in a prison, he gets a mysterious note telling of arrangements made for his escape. He makes good on his escape only to find that his benefactors are the daughter of an American doctor (Lauren Bacall) and a village of Chinese who are less than thrilled with their communist masters. They have arranged to steal a ferry boat and want John Wayne to pilot it 300 miles to Hong Kong and take the entire village with him. The communist gun boats make for dangerous adversaries but navigating the river with a decrepit paddle wheeler, no charts and lack of fuel makes the going even more difficult. Taming Lauren Bacall makes all of that easy in comparison.

As usual, John Wayne plays himself in this film. He is a tough, uncompromising man who sets out to do a seemingly impossible task. This time it happens to be in China and aboard a ship. The character does not change but no one expects the Duke to be anyone but himself.

Bacall plays her part as a feisty American woman. She is, of course, Wayne's love interest in this film and her strong willed nature seems perfect to clash with Wayne's own will of iron. The conflict of wills comes across well. The love story comes across less well. Still, it is an entertaining movie.

This is one movie I can watch over and over again. When the boat steams up and starts rolling down the river it's non-stop adventure. Nothing, I mean nothing is going to stop John Wayne from delivering the people of a Chinese village to freedom from the grips of the Communists. Director William (Wild Bill) Wellman once again delivers. Don't forget William Wellman because he was one of our best directors. I think it's time that he gets some recognition for his great body of work.

"Blood Alley" is a big, sprawling, grandly mounted and sumptuously photographed adventure story starring John Wayne and Lauren Bacall that tells the tale of a merchant sea captain (Wayne) who has had his freighter stopped and boarded illegally in international waters by the Red Chinese, and who has been imprisoned by them for some time since. A village downriver from the prison where Wayne has been kept antes up a bribe to the prison guards and gets Wayne sprung. Taken downriver by his "contact", big Mike Mazurski made up to look oriental, Duke is informed that the entire village wants to escape to Hong Kong and they want him, Duke, to captain them all down the Formosa Straits ("Blood Alley") to Hong Kong and freedom...and they want this to be done on a leaky, creaky, pokey-slow and prone-to-breakdown stern-wheeled ferryboat. With no charts.
Wayne mulls this and decides he has no choice in the matter. He makes a homemade chart from memory and sets about to put the escape plan in motion, taking everyone with him, including the headstrong daughter (Bacall) of a medical missionary, and an entire family of loyal communists who can't be left behind because their masters would kill them as "responsible" for this flight.
Down the straits goes the ferry boat, dodging commie gunboats day and night and slipping into forests of reeds for camouflage when their pursuers draw too near.

The telling of the story of this journey is so well done that the viewer tends to be detoured away from the story's great glaring logical pothole. This escape is set in the mid-1950s and NOT the EIGHTEEN fifties. Decades earlier it COULD have happened the way it is shown, but NOT in its supposed time period. The reason? Airplanes. In the mid-1950s Communist Chinese forces would have aircraft up and down the Formosa Straits LOOKING for this ferry and they WOULD find it. Yet there is never a mention of aircraft here and no aircraft ever shows up anywhere in the movie. Its almost as though there is no such thing as a search plane in existance...or any kind of plane at all!!!

Very Strange. Yet, it is only later that you realize this. Throughout the film the movie-makers keep you so involved with the dangers and rigors of the journey that you don't even THINK about planes while you're watching it. Very clever diversion.

There is good chemistry with Wayne and Bacall and they go through the typical "difficult" time with each other before becoming hard-breathers as they enter Hong Kong Harbour together.

Aside from some minor silliness (Duke perpetually talks to an "imaginary friend" named "Baby"....which happened to be Bogart's pet name for Bacall) and the aforementioned mysteriously missing aircraft, this William Wellman-directed story hangs together well and delivers the goods on excitement and interest.

Good movie overall.

Now...WHEN are they EVER going to release one of Wayne's all time masterpieces? WHEN are we EVER going to see "The High And The Mighty"???????

BLOOD ALLEY (directed in 1955 by William A. Wellman and produced by John Wayne's film company Batjac) is one of the more unusual John Wayne adventures of the period. Set in Communist-run China, Wayne plays Tom Wilder, a sea captain assigned the task of taking a boatload of Chinese refugees to the safety of the Hong Kong harbour. To do so he must guide the boat down the dangerous 300-mile waterway known as 'Blood Alley'...

Also along for the ride is Lauren Bacall. She provides a much-welcome presence as Cathy Grainger, the daughter of a local doctor who has been murdered by the Communist regime. The cast also includes familiar Batjac personalities Joy Kim ("The High and the Mighty"), Anita Ekberg ("Man in the Vault"), Paul Fix and Barry Kroeger.

Although John Wayne's Batjac production company bankrolled the film, Robert Mitchum was originally-cast in the role of Captain Wilder; but he was later fired following a violent on-set incident. Both Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart (Bacall's real-life husband) were considered until it became necessary for John Wayne himself to step into the role.

Released hot on the heels of the previous years' John Wayne/William A. Wellman collaboration "The High and the Mighty" (1954), BLOOD ALLEY did very well at the box office, earning great notices for it's stars Wayne and Lauren Bacall. The timely political theme of the story had a lot to do with it's resonance with film audiences of the period. Today, we can still enjoy BLOOD ALLEY for it's tense action scenes, stunning CinemaScope photography and the memorable chemistry of Wayne and Bacall (they were later reunited in 1976 for "The Shootist"). Highly-recommended.

(Single-sided, dual-layer disc).

I recently visited "China Camp State Park" near San Rafael on San Francisco Bay. I was surprised to learn that Blood Alley was filmed there. I had seen the movie many years before in a pan and scan version on regular broadcast TV. I had assumed that the movie was filmed in Hong Kong or someplace in the orient. I was very pleased on viewing the DVD that it contained a couple of short "making of" added features, based on home movies that John Wayne took during the filming at China Camp. It surprised me to learn that John Wayne was as much a producer of the film as its star. His home movies revealed other surprises too -- like the need for fog making machines in San Francisco Bay. I was pleased that little has changed at China Camp and it still looks much the same as it did in the movie. I am not a particular fan of John Wayne, although I do admire several of his movies very much including Hatari, The Cowboys, True Grit and The Shootist. It was especially nice to see another movie with John Wayne and Lauren Becall. While I like Lauren better in "The Shootist", her feisty personality works well played against John Wayne's usual self portrayal. I must agree strongly with another reviewer that the costume designer for the film was really off the mark with the dresses and make-up for Lauren Becall. Unfortunately, that really dates the film to the early 1950's. Otherwise, the story, action, special effects are all first rate and the film holds up well when compared to recent productions.
Richard Chamberlain

Sort of a strange film but, dare I say it, entertaining. Nicely made. This feels as if were made in between major efforts. Not one of Wayne's best but certainingly not his worst. For that, see (or don't see) "The Conquerer". The pairing with Bacall is very good. The two stars work well together and their interaction provides the story's framework and keeps things interesting.

Just curious, are the Chinese village sets the same as those used in the Bogart film "The Left Hand of God"? Now there's a DVD candidate.

The DVD image looks good. Yes, the color is somewhat muted, but this film is around 50 years old and film stock from that period wasn't the best nor was it carefully preserved. Still, this film has never looked, or sounded, better on home video -- and at long, long last we have the full CinemaScpoe image!

Duke and Bacall in an entertaining film. Microwave some popcorn and enjoy.

This is probably one of Wayne's lesser-known films, but it's still a good thrilling adventure. He plays Tom Wilder, an "old China hand" who has been knocking around the seacoast of China in just about anything that will float for most of his adult life--until the Chinese Communists took over, confiscated his old freighter, and imprisoned him for two years. All that has kept him sane and unbrainwashed is his imaginary companion, "Baby," to whom he talks throughout the film. Without warning he gets a mysterious note advising him on escape. Provided with a Russian uniform and a handgun, he slips out of the prison and is ferried by sampan to the village of Chiku Shan, whose people, led by elder Mr. Tso (Paul Fix) and their American friend Cathy Grainger (Lauren Bacall), daughter of a doctor who has recently been shanghaied off to treat an important commissar, have made up their collective mind to defect en masse to Hong Kong, 300 miles away via the Formosa Straits, known to seamen as "Blood Alley." What's more, they have a plan: hijack an ancient sternwheel ferryboat (on which Tso's nephew, the American-trained Tack (Henry Nakamura), is Chief Engineer) that plies the straits to Amoy. But, with no charts, they need a captain/navigator, and that's where Wilder comes in.

The creativity with which Wilder and the villagers carry out their program is perhaps the best part of the film. (Watch for the way they trap and cripple the local patrol gunboat to give themselves time to get away.) But even before they set out, there's peril from the Reds (a detachment of their soldiers searches the village for Wilder, who bayonets a straggler when he attempts to assault Cathy) and the necessity of working out from memory a crude chart of the course the boat will have to follow (which Wilder does on the back of one of Dr. Grainger's anatomical charts, furnished by Cathy's maid SuSu (Joy Kim)). There's also the issue of the Fengs, the local collaborationist family, who have to be taken along because the Reds would blame them for the escape of the village and probably kill them all--"even the little ones." The ferry herself--an 1885-vintage craft manufactured in Sacramento and named after their abandoned home by the villagers--is almost as much a character as any of the people, and they too make the movie worth a look: SuSu, who tries to get Wilder interested in "Missy Cathy" and, when he jokingly turns the tables on her and claims it's she who sets him afire, indignantly tells Cathy that "Captain Sailor-Man" is "clazy...full of ginger;" Tack, a slangy, cigar-smoking expert who can make his ship do things she wasn't designed for and has trained a "black gang" (engine-room crew) consisting entirely of his own cousins right under the nose of his Communist captain; Old Feng, who persuades his family to poison the refugees' food supply; scholarly Mr. Tso; and tough, loyal Big Han (Mike Mazurki), whose cheerful presence brightens several scenes. There's an "African Queen"-ish sequence in which the villagers, male and female together, literally cordelle the ferry through the reed marshes like a keelboat in order not to betray her presence by burning fuel, and a thrilling battle in the wheelhouse in the midst of a raging thunderstorm when two of the Fengs try to overpower Wilder at the wheel, only to be foiled when Tack, in the engine room, hears the ruckus through the speaking tube and sends up a couple of his cousins as reinforcements. And the sequence in which the villagers come aboard--bringing with them all their goods and chattels, from pigs and goats and poultry to carved furniture and golden household Buddhas to several small machine guns acquired Heaven-knows-how--is reminsicent of a similar scene in Heston's "Ten Commandments." Though no longer Politically Correct in these days of official recognition of "the Mainland," it's a good adventure film and one families can enjoy together.

In the 1950s, patriotic, conservative actor John Wayne joined the bandwagon of those who believed that Communism was a serious threat to the U.S. These were the days of the cold war and McCarthyism. While some, such as Senator McCarthy, used the "Red Scare" for political purposes, there were those, such as Wayne, who were sincerely concerned about Communist threats. Historians are still debating whether the threats were real or not. It didn't matter to John Wayne or studio head Jack Warner, who agreed to make a series of films dealing with the perceived dangers of Communism.

Some of the anti-communist films Wayne made for Warner Brothers, such as "Big Jim McLain," seem very dated and even silly at times, but "Blood Alley" remains a good action adventure film with some real twists. Wayne again worked with veteran director "Wild Bill" Wellman, who had directed one of Wayne's most popular films, "The High and The Mighty," the previous year (1954). Wellman, who had directed the first film to win a Best Picture Oscar way back in 1927, "Wings," was nearing the end of his career. Although Wellman's energies were clearly diminishing, he still managed to put some exciting touches into the film, along with charm and humor, as he depicted how Wayne led a group of Chinese villagers to freedom on a battered, aging ferryboat, from the People's Republic of China to Hong Kong (then still a British crown colony).

Wayne was paired for the first time with Lauren Bacall, who was then married to the legendary Humphrey Bogart. (Years later, they again worked together in John Wayne's final film, "The Shootist.") While the romantic elements are shaky in the film, they clearly worked well together. Bacall often played strong, determined women and this is one of her better performances. Wayne and Bacall were joined by a mostly Chinese cast, along with an emerging young actress named Anita Ekberg, who would later achieve some notoriety in her famous wading scene in "La Dolce Vita." Try and spot Ekberg in the film; she is heavily made-up as a Chinese villager. Another non-Chinese actor in the film is beefy Mike Mazurki, who often played heavies or sidekicks in films; this is one of Mike's more likeable characters, as he assists Wayne on the ferryboat.

Of all of Wayne's anticommunist films, "Blood Alley" is probably the best because it is entertaining and exciting. Underscoring the action is a very enchanting musical score by Roy Webb, who benefited from the excellent Warner Brothers studio orchestra.

I saw this movie many years ago and thought it was great, however, I was rather young at the time. I recently bought the DVD and was apprehensive about it not living up to my memory of it. It was actually better than I remembered it. I am also surprised at how many people seem to share my opinion. I thought this movie was far less well known and appreciated than it seems to be.

However, I think some people miss why it is such a good movie. Yes, it is a John Wayne movie and the narration follows his character throughout, however, the real star of the movie is the Chinese village. The villagers are the ones who plan and execute the ingenious escape from Red China. Wayne is just a hired hand; hired to accomplish one of the necessary tasks; and not a very enthusiastic hand at that.

The real story is about the patience, ingenuity, dedication, sacrifice, and determination of the village to accomplish their escape. Although the scenes featuring Wayne and Bacall appear as if they are the main thrust of the story, they are actually, for the most part, just interludes in the real story; which is of the progress of the villagers' plan.

I think this is the key to why this movie holds up so well after many viewings and after 30 years. It would have been a fine movie even without the Hollywood stars. Adding Wayne and Bacall was just the iceing on the cake.

During the early years of the Cold War when the so-called "red, John Wayne (1907-1979) and Lauren Bacall starred in a wonderful film entitled "Blood Alley" in 1955. John Wayne plays a merchant marine captain named Capt. Tom Wilder that has been imprisoned by the Chinese for several years. To keep from losing his mind during his imprisonment, Capt. Wilder creates an imaginary female friend that he names "Baby" and who he talks to frequently. One day, Capt. Wilder is given some unexpected assistance to escape, which he does by setting his mattress on fire. Wearing a Russian military uniform that had been smuggled into the prison, Capt. Wilder makes his way to a waiting junk that is steered by Big Han (Mike Mazurki, 1907-1990). Big Han takes Capt. Wilder along the river and into the East China Sea to a small fictional fishing village named Chikushan. There, he is taken to an old castle that overlooks the bay and the village and is the home of an American doctor, his daughter Cathy Grainger (Lauren Bacall) and a sassy maid named Susu (Joy Kim). Cathy then introduces Capt. Wilder to one of the village elders named Mr. Tso (Paul Fix, 1901-1983), who explains that the 180 residents of Chikushan have risked their lives to rescue him from prison so that he can assist in their escape from Communist rule to freedom in Hong Kong, which was under British rule at the time. Their intended means of escape is to hijack a steam-powered river ferryboat that was built in the nineteenth century and propelled by a large paddle wheel. Capt. Wilder initially doesn't agree to help them, but then changes his mind as he recollects the entire coastline between their position and Hong Kong. However, not everyone in Chikushan is aware of the villagers' intentions. Specifically, the Feng family, lead by Old Feng (Berry Kroeger, 1912-1991), is loyal to the Communists; but the village elders have decided to take the Fengs with them so that they will not be held accountable for the villagers' escape.

Not only did John Wayne star in "Blood Alley", he also produced it and co-directed (uncredited) it with William A. Wellman (1896-1975). Though not a completely believable story, "Blood Alley" does have some very good action sequences (such as when Chinese soldiers visit the village and when the ferryboat is shelled), some very emotional scenes (usually between Wayne and Bacall) and good color cinematography for 1955. Though some aspects of the film would be regarded as stereotypical and politically incorrect by today's standards (such as the manner in which Susu talks), the story is both engaging and entertaining as are the characters. Overall, I rate John Wayne's 1955 film "Blood Alley" with 4.5 out of 5 stars, rounded up to 5 stars, and I am very glad to see it finally released on DVD.