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I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

As in most films produced during the war years, at least those that focused on Asian locales, China Girl probably had two important functions when it was made. The first, of course, was to entertain audiences with action and romance, to be profitable, the second was to serve the US war effort though, sadly, there was never much of a US effort made to actually help China until late in the war. In this film George Montgomery--described by some critics as the actor chosen after Montgomery Cliff or Tyrone Power refused the role-- plays a rakish hustler out to profit from the chaos of war. After escaping Japanese controlled China, he lands in Burma where he meets his China Girl, played by Gene Tierney who looks not a bit like a Chinese woman. While there is some attempt to inject other elements to the plot, Japanese agents and even a "love triangle", these seem superficially installed for their melodrama and don't do much to draw the viewer into the story. A major part of the plot is that true love can absolve moral failings. How sweet! There are logistical and factual problems with the story-line: the hero says he has just fled a Japanese military base in Luchow, located in Sichuan, where the Japanese army never advanced to; a World War I vintage biplane carries its passengers several hundred miles over mountainous terrain, surely well beyond such a plane's range; a dispute over destinations has the hero arguing that they will go to Kunming, not Yunnan (Kunming is in the center of Yunnan); the hero and his gal take an evening stroll to the Dhammayan Temple vicinity, about a hundred miles from Mandalay, where they are supposed to be. But one would not expect Hollywood scriptwriters to be familiar with Asian geography,and viewers of that era even less so.All in all, a mediocre effort to depict a trans-continental romance set against the background of horrendous human tragedy in WW II China. There were some good films made during this period, but this is not one of them.

Set during the Japanese invasion of China, an American photographer named "Johnny 'Bugsy' Williams" (George Montgomery) has been captured and put in a jail cell. As luck would have it he gets help from a Canadian mercenary "Bull Weed" (Victor McLaglen) and a beautiful female named "Fifi" (Lynn Bari) and manages to escape in an airplane that just happens to have been fueled and ready for takeoff. When he gets to Mandalay he meets up with another beautiful woman named "Haoli Young" (Gene Tierney) and falls in love with her. Unfortunately, events take on their own life and things don't go according to plan. At any rate, rather than spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this is an average grade B war movie filmed during World War II. The acting was barely adequate and while Gene Tierney was attractive she was less than convincing as a half-Chinese school teacher. But there weren't many Oriental actresses in Hollywood during this time so I suppose she was as qualified as anybody else for the part.

During the early days after America's entry into WWII, Hollywood cranked up the pro-war propaganda machine to both explain and justify our late participation and urgent need to catch up in the global battle against fascism. This pre-Pearl Harbor story concerns one he-man opportunist's efforts to juggle the bad guys and bad (?) girls with questionable motives. At times it looks like a film noir and other times a spy romance/melodrama, but with cynical dialogue by the master Ben Hecht and tough-guy direction by Henry Hathaway, this chop suey has enough meat and potatoes to satisfy. Example of the catchy language: George Montgomery says to sexy Lynn Bari, "I like you because you're everything a girl should be, 115 pounds of lies, venom and kisses." Another line has spy Victor McLaglen reporting the only Japanese he could translate from a secret document was the number 7 and the word Pearl!!! Oh - and the reason most folks will be watching - the China Girl, Gene Tierney is scrumptious!

Probably "China Girl" is a movie for cinephiles (I'm not one of them, though). Hathaway is a high-level film-maker, McLaglen, Montgomery, Lynn Bari, Ruman are gifted and nice actors. The black-and-white photography is beautiful: the scenes inside the colonial hotel are indeed very evocative. Even the plot is better than one may expect and presents a noble finale. At any rate, it is so pleasant to see a film with no beastly violence and trash talk which are routine in current movies. Of course, for us happy people Gene Tierney's fans, the main recommendation for "China Girl" is the presence of our Goddess of Love and Beauty. Beyond her incomparable beauty and loveliness, Gene shows her usual (underrated) talent as an actress: with her sad dreaming eyes, her rare sweet smiles, her refusal to give way to love, even her bravery in sharing her unhappy people's sufferences, she instills in the audience the foreboding of her bitter fate.