55 giorni a Pechino

55 Days at Peking is directed by Nicholas Ray and Andrew Marton and collectively written by Philip Yordan, Bernard Gordon, Robert Hamer and Ben Barzman. It stars Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, David Niven and Flora Robson. Music is scored by Dimitri Tiomkin and cinematography is by Jack Hildyard.

1900, Peking, China. The Boxer Rebellion. 13 of 18 provinces are under foreign rule and the Chinese have had enough. With Dowager Empress Tzu-Hsi secretly supporting the Boxer societies, the foreign powers come under attack and are forced to defend the legations' compound until reinforcements from the military arrive. The defence would last for 55 days.

Lavish, full of pictorial scope, often stirring, yet it's saggy in the middle, too long, killed Nicholas Ray's career (and nearly himself since he collapsed on set) and apparently offensive to some with its imperialistic trumpeting. It has been called the magnificent failure, and in truth that's about as apt a tag line as you could get. For production value it's up with the best of them as producer Samuel Bronston oversees the building of the wonderful Peking sets (Veniero Colasanti & John Moore) at his Madrid base, and it is a joy to behold. Tiomkin's score pings around the locale with aural pleasure and when the action does come it considerably raises the pulses.

Acting performances are mostly OK, especially when Niven and Heston share scenes as it's great to see a genuine screen presence playing off of classy elegance. Gardner, whilst not in any shape or form bad, gets one of those annoyingly dull romantic interest roles that a film of this type didn't need. It doesn't help that there is zero chemistry between Gardner and her "borderline" beau, Heston. It's no surprise to find that Heston thought Gardner was a pain during the shoot!

As for the troubling thematics? Where the Chinese are portrayed as Christian slaughtering savages and the foreign imperialists as noble defenders of the right to take over China? Well the picture does come off as trying to excuse foreign imperialism in China, but it helps to note that this is merely a movie about one event in that part of history. With that in mind, anyone viewing it expecting anything other than the 55 day siege told from the legation's viewpoint is always going to be in for a let down! And right from the off we are shown and told with a tint of sarcasm that all these "foreign" countries want a piece of China as they raise their flags and trundle out their national anthems.

The Peking Alamo? Well maybe? Best to go into it expecting your eyes and ears to be dazzled rather than your brain. 7/10

Watching this film in a PC era like today you may find allegations of racism being made against it , but you have to remember that 55 DAYS AT PEKING was made in 1963 . The war in the Pacific had ended less than 20 years earlier and the horrors of the Burma railway and the Bataan death march were still fresh in the memory . Likewise the UN had fought a dirty and bloody war against North Korea and Communist China ten years earlier and 1963 was a year when America started committing ground troops to South Vietnam , so this was an era where many people were worried about " the yellow peril " . One thing you can't really accuse the film of being is geo-nationalist , a coalition featuring diverse nations like Germany , Russia , Italy and France fighting alongside Britain and America ! You can tell this was made a long time ago and if it was made today the Americans would have saved the day single handed while portraying everyone else as total cowards . At least the makers of 55 DAYS AT PEKING had the decency of showing a factual historical event without having to totally rewrite history . I do hope present day Hollywood producers will take note .

My only problem with this film is that the main story is held up with a romantic subplot featuring Charlton Heston who's not exactly romantic material , but this is soon forgiven when the battle scenes arrive and what battle scenes they are . Watching these scenes today I was struck as to how they were achieved by a combination of stuntmen and stuffed dummies . That's what I hate about modern day blockbusters that rely on cartoonish CGI figures running around . It's a lot more fun seeing a couple of man sized dolls falling a couple of hundred feet with dubbed screams on the soundtrack , Hollywood doesn't seem to do this type of action sequence anymore which is a great pity

I am commenting on the DVD version that I have now and I have not seen since 1963. There is a very big difference as in 1963 not only I was much younger but Cinema has changed. 55 Days was a Large Screen Movie compared with the Ten Commandments, Cleopatra of the same year 1963 and The Sound of Music and many others at that period. In those days of Cinema Hollywood convinced people to go to the Cinema with Movies that are not the same on Black and White TV on Small Screen. Watching it on DVD is not the same. Technirama an Advanced Technicolor, Dolby Stereo not as big as Cinerama. I specifically remember sitting in the cinema and the sound moved behind us. For example the Musical Bands in the opening scenes playing the anthems. About the History of China read the other comments. Still a very exciting Movie where a minority overcomes the Mass's winning at the end. David Niven does an interesting part that reminds me of the Guns of Navarone. Heston and most other actors do it very well too. Nine out of Ten in Sam's Scale.

The fifties and early sixties were the golden age of the large-scale historical epic. Most of these dealt with either Biblical, Classical or Mediaeval history, but there was also a fashion for making movies on a similar epic scale dealing with more recent historical events. Many of these dealt with some aspect of European colonialism or with relations between Westerners and the inhabitants of some other part of the globe, such as "Bridge on the River Kwai", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Khartoum" or "Fifty-Five Days at Peking" which relates, from a Western viewpoint, the story of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. My thanks are due to T R P Dean for his helpful review setting out the historical background to this event.

The film narrates the story of how the foreign residents of the Legation Quarter of Peking (it was obviously not the fashion to call it "Beijing" in 1963) managed to hold out for a siege of nearly two months in the summer of 1900 before being relieved by a multi-national expeditionary force. The main characters on the Western side are Major Lewis, the commander of the small detachment of American marines in Peking, and Sir Arthur Robertson, the British ambassador. The main characters on the Chinese side, although we see less of that side, are the Dowager Empress Tzu-Hsi and her counsellors, the devious and anti-foreigner Prince Tuan and the more liberal General Jung-Lu, who favours rapprochement with the foreigners.

There were a few things about the film that I did not like. Like a number of others, I felt that it would have been an improvement if the leading Chinese characters had not been portrayed by Western actors. I do not hold to any principle of political correctness that states that a character should not be portrayed by an actor of a different nationality, but in this particular case I felt that Chinese actors would have been more convincing. The action in the second half of the film tended to drag a bit, especially the episode where the Westerners make a raid to destroy the Boxers' arsenal. The decision to add some love-interest in the form of a romance between Lewis and a Russian princess was definitely a mistake. Charlton Heston was generally fine as an action hero but less convincing, as here, as a romantic one. Ava Gardner's performance as Princess Natasha was very much below par; there is little passion in the scenes between her and Heston.

I do not, however, agree with the criticism that the film should have showed more of the historic background to the Boxer Rebellion. The aim was to make an epic adventure story about one particular episode during that rebellion; to have attempted to explore the complexities of Chinese politics during the years leading up to it would have resulted in a very lengthy and tedious film, especially if the filmmakers had tried to include reference to events as remote in time as the Opium Wars, as some have suggested. In the main, that aim was a successful one. At the centre of the film are two fine contributions, particularly from David Niven as Robertson. Robertson is the Westerners' equivalent of Jung-Lu, a liberal by the standards of his period who (unlike many of the other Europeans) hopes to avoid war by taking a conciliatory attitude towards the Chinese. When war comes, he is forced to look inside himself to find reserves of courage and stoicism. Apart from his scenes with Gardner, Heston is also good as Lewis, the tough man of action. Although he is a very different character from Robertson, the two men discover a respect for each other as the crisis brings them together. The spectacular action scenes were mostly well done, and the costumes and architecture of this period of Chinese history were reproduced on a grand scale. Despite a few faults, this was a film that I enjoyed. 7/10

A top-notch cast recreates a portion of the so-called "Boxer Rebellion" at the turn of the twentieth century, when Chinese reactionaries (a group called "Boxers"), opposing westernization, tried to drive western traders, missionaries and diplomats out of China.

Though "55 Days at Peking" is extremely simplified, since its history is probably unknown to most movie buffs, there is a lot of exposition, which means a lot of talk. The best epics (such as "Lawrence of Arabia") allow the images to do most of the talking. But the necessity of setting up the dilemma of western diplomats trapped in their compound by the hoards of reactionary Boxers requires a history lesson.

It also tends to dilute the tension. Unlike a similar film (and slightly later) film "Zulu", "55 Days at Peking" tends toward the "Grand Hotel" or "Ship of Fools" style of movie-making that would be pursued in the '70s disaster flicks, making it more study of soap-opera characters than about the tension of events. Though most viewers will not know the fictional characters, there are far too many (characters and fictional characters), which diffuses the interest in them too far (does anyone feel much sympathy for diplomats, in any case?), even though Heston, Niven, Harry Andrews and the rest act their hearts out. And there are many cloying sub-plots.

While it's the foundation of a pretty good (if superficial) story on the Boxer Rebellion, it never quite achieves its promise. It's too bad a movie can't be made about the Rebellion in these highly charged times in the early twenty-first century, when moviemakers seem to think all westernization is wrong.