We Want China!

55 Days at Peking (1963) was one of my favorite films as a kid, and it's easy to see why. A depiction of the infamous anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion in 1900 China, it has an exotic setting, a fine tough guy cast, a fascinating historical setting, and of course, lots of great cast-of-thousands battle scenes - not to mention, it played on AMC every other weekend, another definite plus. A budding history buff and war movie fan like myself loved the movie on its subject matter alone, and I could put up with the stilted character development, slow build-up and trite background melodrama for the kickass battle scenes.

Of course, watching it as an adult who knows more about movies and history than a 12 year old kid provides one with more perspective and a critical eye. It's very easy to criticize the film's implicit support of imperialism and borderline racism, but in a way it's just as much a liberal fantasy as a reactionary one: the film's depiction of the world's great powers coming together, United Nations-style, to confront a common threat is very much a Harry Truman/JFK-style pipe dream. As a drama and a depiction of history, it's badly dated, but it still holds up reasonably well as its primary classification: an old-fashioned action/adventure spectacle.

In 1900, Imperial China, ruled by the cruel Empress Dowager Tzu-Hsi (Flora Robson), is suffering from a variety of ailments, from a drought to bad harvest to, more pressingly, the incursions of various imperial powers - Britain, France, Russia, Germany and Japan most notably. The Boxers, a fanatical, murderous group of extreme nationalists, launch a revolt against Westerners, killing missionaries and diplomats en masse, and the Empress, urged on by devious minister Prince Tuan (Robert Helpmann), quietly supports the Boxers, believing them the only way to deliver her country from the foreign devils. At around this time, US Marine Major Lewis (Charlton Heston) arrives in Peking with a small detachment of Marines to bolster the small Legation Guard, with a pitifully small number of diplomats and soldiers, led by cool-headed British Minister Arthur Robertson (David Niven), protecting the legations from hordes of Boxers - and, later, well-armed Imperial troops. The legations, low on men, supplies and ammunition, must keep themselves alive long enough for a relief column out of Tientsin to break through the lines of Imperial Troops and liberate them - and there will be much heroism and deringdo in the mean time.

55 Days at Peking was one of producer Samuel Bronston's trio of super-epics, after El Cid and King of Kings, and before The Fall of the Roman Empire. Veteran American director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar) was only the nominal director, with Bronston providing most creative and veteran second-unit director Andrew Marton (of The Longest Day and Ben-Hur) filming most of the action scenes. In the process, they strip a lot of the interest away from the Boxer Rebellion, and make an entertaining but dated and simplistic story about one of the most dramatic events in modern history.

The film's politics are at once simplistic and confusing (not to say complex). The movie embraces the long-discredited view of the international collaboration to stop the Boxers, simplying what could have been an intriguingly complex story about imperialism and international competition into a story of colonial powers agreeing the slice up the world proportionately, and kill or subdue everyone who stands in their way. The virtues or problems of imperialism aren't explored in any meaningful way; it's enough that our heroes are in harm's way to justify our cheering for them. The film shows the Western powers - also including, to be fair, the Japanese, just then flexing their muscles as an imperial power - calmly and diplomatically debating whether or not to stay in Peking, cooperating fully in the defense of the Legations, and doing their best to avoid bloodshed until the Boxers force their hand. At one point, our brave missionaries and soldiers nobly decline to assassinate the Empress - this, in a film made at the time that the CIA and KGB intrigue and skullduggery was at its height in Cuba, Vietnam, the Congo, and elsewhere in the Third World. In another key scene, however, David Niven's minister delivers a shockingly blunt ultimatum to the Empress, telling her that she'd best accept the situation and bow to the inevitable or else be crushed. This is gunboat diplomacy in its crudest form, and the film makes no comment on it; this is in fact presented as heroic and righteous, casting a negative light on the film's plea for international cooperation. However the film may have meant it, the cooperation it endorses is in aid of fair and just imperialism, rather than any noble motive.



The film's depiction of the Boxers and their Imperial Allies is, sad to say, predictably one-sided. The Chinese are allowed a brief moment to justify their grievances against the foreign invaders, but they are quickly dismissed, and we're left with perfidious, dragon-fingered and bloodthirsty leaders and screaming yellow hordes of fanatical Boxers for our heroes to gun down in droves (the presence of British actors like Flora Robson and Robert Helpmann playing "yellow-faced" Chinese leaders doesn't help matters). To be fair, the Boxers were murderous criminals more than they were patriots, but to blithely dismiss Chinese grievances over their country's being invaded and exploited as simply the machinations of evil figures is ridiculously chauvinistic. (Granted, at a time when Mao was purging tens of millions of "counterrevolutionaries" in modern China, a contemporary parallel may well have been on Bronston's mind.) Curiously, Peking is a product of its time in showing both sides of the political spectrum, and neither has held up well over the years.

To criticize the film's historical inaccuracies in light of what we know now about the Boxers and Western imperialism in China is rather unfair. Bronston and company simply swallowed the long-propagated myth of united colonial powers standing together against heathen Boxer devils. The truth, needless to say, is much more complex than that simplistic interpretation: the Allies endlessly squabbling amongst themselves about what steps to take, and who should share the glory in both the defense of Peking and its liberation. The fate of the Chinese Christians, who bore far more of the carnage than the foreign powers, is largely ignored, save a few brief scenes; and all nations are equally brave, heroic and noble, which history shows not to be the case. The film is unduly fair to the French, Germans and Russians, who did little of the fighting and engaged in a great deal of looting, murdering and rape throughout their march to China (indeed, this war is how Germans earned the nickname "Hun"). It is not chauvinism to point this out, or to say that the Americans, British and Japanese are the only of the Eight-National Alliance to come off well on that score; I advise anyone accusing me of such to look at the historical record. A modern director would no doubt be able to do better with the material we have available to us; not only a rousing war epic with exotic locales, but an exploration of imperialism, foreign competition, and perhaps, if we were in a John Milius mood, the place of America (and Japan) as newfound powers on the world stage! Alas, this was apparently beyond Bronston and Ray, who were content with a simplified, politically-incorrect shoot-'em-up war epic.

Perhaps more troublesome than the historical and political content, which are to an extent understandable, are the cheap attempts to throw melodrama and pathos into the story. A romance between Lewis and Natalie Ivanoff (Ava Gardner), a disgraced Russian baroness, is shoehorned into the film's plot and does nothing but drag the proceedings to an interminable length. Heston and Gardner have no chemistry and so the romance isn't even enjoyable for its own sake. Even more pathetic is a subplot involving one of Lewis's officers (Jerome Thor) and his half-Chinese daughter Teresa (Lynne Sue Moon) - though, to be fair, it provides one of the film's best moments, when Lewis is forced to tell the girl of her father's death. Historical inaccuracies and dated politics can be accepted, but stiff, obnoxious melodrama with no purpose is harder to swallow. Thus, in between the battle scenes, the film often drags interminably, and we wait impatiently for the cannons and gingals to start firing again.

All that aside, 55 Days at Peking remains watchable through virtue of its action scenes and spectacle. The movie has several striking sequences, most notably the brilliant opening where Peking is flooded with the sounds of the great powers blaring their national anthems in unison into the marketplace - a scene echoed at the very end when troops of all nations parade triumphantly into the legation quarter, again singing and playing their respective marches. The art direction and set design are without peer; turn-of-the-century Peking is reconstructed wonderfully on Spanish sets. And needless to say the battle scenes are impressive, exciting and handsomely mounted; the movie lacks the graphic violence of more recent war films, but like other old-school epics (Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus), Peking makes up for it with the sheer spectacle of hundreds of real people duking it out.

The cast is a mixed bag, doing what they can with the material. Charlton Heston gives a rather typical Heston performance: stiff, rugged, mannered, with lots of screen presence but not much dramatic heavy-lifting, aside from the aforementioned scene with the Chinese girl. Ava Gardner is pathetically wasted with a useless character; she can't even keep her Russian accent straight for more than a few lines. Of the leads, David Niven steals the show; it's far from his best performance, but his cynical, tart yet civilized impudence works wonders here. The supporting cast frequently steals the show: Flora Robson, despite her yellow-face, is as regal and imposing a monarch as she was playing Elizabeth I in The Sea Hawk twenty-three years prior. Harry Andrews and Paul Lukas have fine supporting roles, as a priest and a doctor, respectively; dependable old hands like John Ireland, Walter Gotell, Joseph Furst, Elizabeth Sellars, Massimo Serato, Kurt Kasznar and Eric Pohlmann ably handle smaller parts. Japanese director Juzo Itami has a key role as the heroic Colonel Shiba, leader of the Japanese Marines, and Nicholas Ray himself has a cameo as the incapacitated American Minister.



55 Days at Peking is a mildly diverting old-fashioned historical epic that is very much a product of its time; it's decent entertainment, but its politics and history are hopelessly out of date. If ever an old film cried to be remade, it's this one; a talented director and crew could make a truly great film out of the Boxer Rebellion, rather than this entertaining but badly dated curio. I will say, however, that it is far more entertaining than Bronston's next effort, the tedious and dull The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Rating: 5/10 serious drama, 8/10 action movie.