Target Hong Kong
                              
Director: Fred Sears
Year: 1953
Rating: 5.0
The Chinese Civil War is over and those damn Chinese Commies are coming after Hong Kong. This low-budget B film pits agents for Communist China against agents for the Nationalists against agents working for the British. And it is fairly confusing. IMDB has this at 70 minutes but my version was 61 minutes, so perhaps I was missing some vital parts but I doubt it. It is a mess of a film but interesting for its subject matter. Back in 1953 the Russians had put up the Iron Curtain and were on the verge of developing nukes, China was Communist and the Yellow Peril was on the rebound and the Asian Domino theory was not far away. There was a lot of paranoia in America, some justified, some not. Russia and China were public enemies' number one. It is good to see that things have changed.



Lassiter (Richard Denning) is a solider of fortune, just back from Vietnam where he assassinated a warlord for the French. He was paid $25,000 for the job and is in Hong Kong gambling it at a casino owned by Lao Shan (Soo Yong). He keeps betting on number 13 and it hasn't been lucky for him. He is getting luckier with Ming Shan (Nancy Gates), the daughter of the female owner. The film actually does make reference to a white woman playing a Chinese when Denning wonders how that happened. When he loses all his money at the table, two of his former friends (Michael Pate and former wrestler Henry Kulky) grab him and take him to the Chinese agents for the British - among them Philip Ahn and Number two son, Victor Sen Young.  They persuade Lassiter to work for them in ferreting out undercover commies - Richard Loo and Russian agent Ben Astar.



They have fooled Lao Shan that they are on the side of the nationalists and want to use her small army to create an incident in Hong Kong so that the Communists can move in and take over Hong Kong. Or at least I think. None of it made much sense. There is some good stock footage of Hong Kong at the time, but the filmmakers didn't go further than California, even clearly using footage from another film to have the Commies shooting down innocent civilians. If nothing else, these sorts of films provided work for Asian-American actors.