Simply Perfect

As Good As It Gets

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

It's hard to believe that this cliched, relentlessly melodramatic triangle hospital soaper had its genesis in a novel by Nobel-prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck. True, it is set against a rather realistic WW2 background. The RKO miniatures specialists and the stock footage department work overtime to blow up buildings and wreak destruction. But few people will swallow either the main plot or its two equally hackneyed sub-plots, one involving a ridiculously caricatured Japanese colonel (played with heavily theatrical over-emphasis by Richard Loo), the other featuring Anthony Quinn under Oriental make-up as a loyalist resistance fighter. Poor Philip Ahn is caught in the middle of both sub-plots, but even he can do little with his radio-serial lines and weak-kneed characterization. Ellen Drew has the thankless role of the unsympathetic wife, while Ruth Warrick dispenses blank goody-goodiness, and Randolph Scott doctors on doggedly. As for Ducky Louie, Carol Thurston and the rest of the mainly Chinese players, we will pass over their efforts in silence. By some quirk that is difficult to understand from today's perspective, China Sky was quite successful at the box-office. I would have thought it fell between two stools - too much action for the girls, far too much soppy romance for the boys.The Director: Known as a reliable work-horse, Ray Enright was under contract to Warner Bros. from 1929 to 1941. Enright commenced freelancing in 1942 with his best-known film The Spoilers, starring John Wayne and Randolph Scott. In fact he seems to have reached his stride with westerns such as Trail Street, Albuquerque, Coroner Creek, South of St Louis, Montana, Kansas Raiders and Flaming Feather.

The very definition of "programmer." Randolph Scott and the two ladies that form the other points of the triangle are okay, but Anthony Quinn with his pasted-back eyelids is a heavy cross for any movie to bear, even for 1945. It doesn't help that the dialog, as usual, is given to the foreigners without any contractions. "You will help or we will die." The Korean Philip Ahn is Scott's doctor colleague and he ponders his torn allegiances with precise diction. Richard Loo, a Hawaiian-born Chinese, is a perennial Japanese ghoul in these war-time flicks, sinister and sneering.It's an inexpensive movie, a love story set amid the Japanese invasion of China, and it looks slack and limp. The Chinese hills look like California hills. Actors hit their spot and say their lines, look disturbed or happy, and then walk away.It's good that it was made, though. After the Japanese invasion, the slaughter in China was enormous. It's not something the West likes to think about too often now, because Japan is now our friend, while China is a communist country that sells us cheap goods. Gosh.

"China Sky" is a film set in China and it does feature some Asian-American actors. However, oddly, the film also features Anthony Quinn in one of the leading roles and he, too, plays someone who is Chinese! Other than Mantan Moreland or Willie Best, I can't think of an actor who looked LESS Chinese than Quinn! I know he did have a reputation as a man who could play many, many different nationalities, but this is ridiculous. However, such bizarre casting is not very unusual. During this same era in Hollywood, such obviously non-Asian actors as Walter Huston and even Kathrine Hepburn were picked to play these sort of roles! Plus, Carol Thurston also plays one of natives in "China Sky" and is pretty clearly not Asian.This film was made near the end of WWII and is set in a hospital in China during their war with Japan. Ruth Warrick plays Dr. Sara--a single and pretty lady working in China during the war. Considering she's pretty much on her own there, it seems a bit ridiculous. As the film begins, Dr. Gray (Randolph Scott) returns--and Dr. Sara is excited...until she sees that Gray has brought along his new wife (Ellen Drew). This is a problem, as it's obvious that the good Dr. Sara wanted him for herself and the new wife is quite a surprise! Soon the new wife is revealed to be a shallow shrew--and unsheathes her claws on Dr. Sara! At this point it's obvious that by the end of the film the wife will be history and Dr. Sara will have her good Doctor for herself. In fact, it was downright silly as the dumb wife inexplicably ran through the middle of a gunfight (with machine guns even) only to die--thus freeing up the doctors to fall in love!! Oooo, this really pained me it was so clichéd!At the same time there is a parallel story involving a stereotypically evil Japanese commander who is being held prisoner. He somehow manages to get a Korean doctor to help him--though this makes absolutely no sense at all considering what the Japanese had done to Korea as well as the guy being a doctor.This film suffers from some of the worst mock Chinese dialog I have ever heard. All the Chinese people seem quaintly inscrutable and a bit like happy savages--and I am sure any Asian watching the film would be pretty ticked off by these portrayals. Never do they really seem like people! And, aside from the new wife, all the white folks in the film are noble--too noble. In fact, no one at all in the film seems real in the least.Overall, there really isn't a whole lot to recommend the film. The romantic triangle could have been pretty interesting---but none of the rest of the film was believable or worthwhile. The only reason I watched is because I would watch Randolph Scott in anything--and as usual he did a nice job, though the film was clearly beneath his talents. Not a good film by any stretch of the imagination.

Randolph Scott gets top billing, but ultimately this is Ruth Warrick's picture. She's a doctor holding together a makeshift hospital in China while its founder (Scott) is on his way back with much needed supplies--and a new wife, to her thinly-veiled disappointment. Having seen Warrick in a few other 1940s films, I can understand why the doc failed to notice her: despite her attractiveness, she never really exuded any sex appeal. But her character is very likable, while the new wife's shallowness becomes apparent within minutes of her entrance. And that's the problem with this picture--too easy. In fact, all it does is lower the audience's opinion of the foolish doctor for not seeing what's painfully apparent even to the other character's who don't speak the language. There's a similar subplot involving another doctor and a nurse, that's equally obvious. A wounded Japanese villain provides more action for the story, whose loose ends get tied up all too neatly and quickly. Either Pearl S. Buck's original novel just wasn't one of her better ones, or this movie doesn't do it justice. Nevertheless, it probably made for a decent lead-in on a double-feature back in the day.