1955 - SOLDIER OF FORTUNE, another film in the wonder of Cinemascope

Set in Hong Kong in the 1950's with Communist China hanging over the heads of the British colony.  Soldier of Fortune was based on a book by Ernest K. Gann, who also wrote the screenplay.  The film stars Clark Gable and Susan Hayward.  Hayward's husband played by Gene Barry is a prisoner in Communist China and Gable is the man she turns to for help in an escape attempt.  Naturally Hayward and Gable fall in love before the big escape scene.  This is a very bad movie.

The film was shot in Fox's CinemaScope screen process with the widescreen just constantly full of a lot of pictorial scenery, when the film moves indoors the sets are so full of stuff that it seems like the actors are performing inside a museum gallery.  The director Edward Dmytryk appears to have had his hands full just moving people around the widescreen frame.  

 

But frankly the chief villain of this film is not Communist China but the terrible screenplay from Ernest Gann. Everything about this film just stinks, the colorful characters, the love story, the plot and the lack of action.  It seems like 20th Century Fox took this production and as they say tried to "put lipstick on the pig, " to cover up its deficiencies.

 

This was Clark Gable's first film away from MGM studios.  Working as a freelancer,  his later films kind of lacked the spark he had brought to his early MGM films.  Susan Hayward who apparently was a pretty tough cookie was going through a divorce and refused to travel to Hong Kong for filming.  Any scenes with Gable and Hayward on location are played by a stand-in for Hayward. The rest of her scenes were filmed on sound stages back in Hollywood. 

 The best I can say about this film is that it runs 96 minutes.