Blood Alley
| Blood Alley | |
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| Directed by | William A. Wellman |
| Produced by | John Wayne |
| Screenplay by | Albert Sidney Fleischman |
| Based on | the novel by Albert Sidney Fleischman |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Roy Webb |
| Edited by | Fred McDowell |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
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Release date
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Running time
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115 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $2 million |
| Box office | $2.2 million (US) |
Blood Alley is a 1955 seafaring adventure movie starring John Wayne and Lauren Bacall set in China.
The ship of Captain Tom Wilder, an American Merchant Mariner, is seized by the Chinese Communists and he is imprisoned by them for two years in the vicinity of Amoy Island. Captain Wilder is helped to escape from prison, dressed as a Soviet officer. The huge Chinese who transports him to Chiku Shan village (Big Han) will not tell him why he has been broken out of prison.
Once they arrive at the village, the village headman, Mr. Tso, explains all to the captain. He has been recruited to take the people of Chiku Shan village in Red China to then-British Hong Kong. To do this, he has a small, wood-burning sternwheel riverboat not intended for oceangoing service, his memory of the coast, a handmade chart he draws himself, an unreliable magnetic compass to navigate with, and the determination of the people of Chiku Shan.
The villagers have been setting up this plan for more than a year, gradually raising the bottom of the channel into their village harbor with stones so that once the local patrol boat is lured inside, sinking some of the village sampans loaded with rocks will cause it to run aground and trap it there, thereby delaying word of their escape. They have also been quietly accumulating arms, ranging from .30 caliber Browning machine guns to Mosin–Nagant rifles and Model 1895 Nagant revolvers, against the day they make their break for freedom. They need to deal with the complication of a family of dedicated Communists in the village, the Fengs, who must be brought along despite their ideology. If they are left behind, they will either inform on the rest of the villagers or be shot for allowing them to escape.
The villagers include the riverboat's Chief Engineer, a US Navy-trained marine engineer named Tack. He has sabotaged the riverboat, to force the ChiComs to install a steel boiler to replace the original cast iron boiler that is not up to the task of taking the ferryboat 300 miles along the coast to Hong Kong. He also helps the villagers who have come aboard as passengers when the escape is launched to pirate the sternwheeler by setting off smoke bombs to simulate a fire aboard. The freedom-loving Chinese take over the ferry and with Wilder in command bring her to the village.
Wayne's love interest is the tough and determined Cathy Grainger, whose father is a medical missionary. Dr. Grainger is murdered by the Reds after an operation he was performing on a political commissar went sour while the final preparations for the escape were being made. Wilder is forced to tell her of the murder just before the villagers leave their ancestral homes for the last time aboard the renamed Chiku Shan.
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Wikipedia