China Girl (1942)

George Montgomery fits the bill quite well here as the moustachioed photo journalist "Johnny" who makes a living taking pictures from war zones. This time he's been posted to Burma where he finds himself amidst quite a conflict between the invading Japanese and the local resistance. The invaders want him to act as a spy for him, and demonstrate quite succinctly what they do to those who don't play ball. He's especially valuable as he is also a pilot, and so could photograph some quite strategic sites along the new Burma Road for them. His newly arrived cellmate "Weed" (Victor McLaglen) and he make a timely escape only for him to find that some documents he accidentally pinched from his interrogators actually have coded information that might prove crucial to the war effort. He's is distracted, however, by "Haoli" (Gene Tierney) who, after a distinctly rocky start, tells him something that will thoroughly change the dynamic of just about everything in this increasingly hostile territory. When she heads off to meet with her schoolteacher father he follows hoping to rescue her - but can he stay one step ahead of his pursuers and reach her in time? It takes a while to get going this, Montgomery is pretty wooden, McLaglen hasn't the jovial whisky-stained character to deliver and so a lot of this is left to an out of sorts Tierney - she isn't really the most convincing as a Chinese lass. Neither is Lynn Bari as the imaginatively duplicitous "Capt. Fifi", and the whole film tries rather statically to mix it's wartime espionage elements with some rather flat romantic ones. The pyrotechnics are quite effective, and it does give us an idea of just how brutal this theatre of the war was in the 1940s, but there's a surfeit of dialogue and we have to wait too long for most of the action. Some nice old cars and planes, though.