Bombs Over Burma
Director: Joseph
H. Lewis
Year: 1942
Rating: 5.0
It is always nice seeing Anna May Wong headline a film even if it is a Poverty
Row production. It is directed by Joseph H. Lewis who is best known for Gun
Crazy and who churned out loads of other B films over his career that were
better than the budgets given him. This one made in 1942 is basic war time
fare in this case boosting the image of the Chinese fighting the Japanese.
Wong plays a part time teacher part time spy for China who gets an assignment
to go to Chungking with a message. She goes by bus that has a few shady characters
on it - Dan Seymour making an always smarmy welcome appearance - one of them
possibly a Japanese spy. It turns into a mystery as much as anything with
enough suspects to fill up an Agatha Christie novel. The ending in which
the spy is trapped in an open field by a group of Chinese laborers with their
farming implements is nicely done as the camera goes back and forth to their
faces. Oddly, Burma has no role in this film. The bombing takes place in
China. The filming somewhere in California.
Anna May Wong was a major fund raiser for the Chinese war effort and in fact
donated her salary from this film to it. Which I would guess was not a lot.
In the same year Wong was to star in The Lady from Chungking in which she
leads a band of partisans against the Japanese.
