Zeus

China Sky (1945)

• Director
  • Ray Enright
• Writers
  • Brenda Weisberg(screen play)
  • Joseph Hoffman(screen play)
  • Pearl S. Buck(novel)
• Stars
  • Randolph Scott
  • Ruth Warrick
  • Ellen Drew

  Pearl S. Buck's novel China Sky is boiled down to a wartime romantic triangle, courtesy of commercial-minded RKO. Randolph Scott and Ruth Warrick play American doctors in a remote Chinese village. The relationship is platonic, but Scott's spiteful wife Ellen Drew suspects hanky-panky. Despite these turgid soap-opera events, World War II has to be fought, and fought it is thanks to guerilla leader Anthony Quinn and insidious Japanese POW Richard Loo, who tries to win half-Japanese doctor Philip Ahn over to the Rising Sun. Halfway down the cast as "the goat" is Chinese juvenile actor Ducky Louie, who enjoyed a brief 1940s stardom in such films as China's Little Devils (1945) and Black Gold (1947), reteaming with Anthony Quinn in the latter film.