[PW] WWII movie set on South Pacific Island

[Ellen Cousins]

This may be it, Bill:

China  (1943)

Starring Alan Ladd and William Bendix

...Alan Ladd and William Bendix are at the top of their form in this 
film, with Bendix emoting like a freight train during some emotional 
moments with a small Chinese baby. Ladd dominates the film throughout 
and defines the entire tone of the picture in two heart-stopping 
sequences that will burn themselves into any viewer's memory...

...The opening shots of Sparrow trying to get through the bombed out 
Chinese village are incredible feats of filmmaking and parallel the kind 
of detail that Spielberg injected into sequences like the Tanis dig site 
and the Ravenwood bar...

...Another strikingly similar visual from the film is a shot in which 
Ladd grabs a Japanese submachine gun and starts blasting away with it...

http://www.theraider.net/information/influences/china.php

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035735

Ellen C.





Bill Davis wrote:
> I'd like to identify a movie I saw as a child.   My impression was 
> that it was about an American on a South Pacific Island during World 
> War II, perhaps spying on Japanese ship movements.   At the end of 
> the movie, the American returns to a small village and finds it has 
> been strafed and everyone apparently killed.  He finds the body of a 
> little native boy he had befriended, next to a baby that had 
> survived.  He buries or moves the dead, and sets himself up in an 
> machine gun dugout with the baby, and is killed while firing back at 
> another Japanese strafing run, left lying dead in the dugout, with 
> the baby crying.  I believe the last scene indicated other survivors 
> had returned, recovered the baby, and were being taken off the island.
> 
> It's similar in theme to NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, with Jeffrey Hunter.  I 
> don't think I've ever seen that movie but I understand it was about 
> George Tweed, who survived the war, so I don't think that would be it.
> 
> Bill Davis