DISPUTED PASSAGE (1939)

In the middle of a run of prestige M-G-M pics (with Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Robert Young, Franchot Tone, Luise Rainer & Spencer Tracy), A-list director Frank Borzage made this decidedly B-list Paramount film.  Taken from a novel by religion-minded ‘Pop’ author Lloyd Douglas* (THE BIG FISHERMAN would become Borzage’s unhappy last film), it’s led by a Pre-‘Road Pic’ Dorothy Lamour, character actor Akim Tamiroff and Gable wannabee John Howard (check out the stash).  No doubt, something splashier was envisioned when Borzage signed on, then downgraded in development, leaving him with no stars and a B+ budget.  Mighty odd script, too, changing direction halfway along as Howard’s rising research doctor, first at school then as assistant to gruff, demanding doctor/professor Tamiroff, meets Lamour, exotic Caucasian, born, bred & orphaned in China, who makes a major impression before heading to a kid’s hospital under Japanese threat back home.  And that’s where the story restarts midway in with Howard seriously injured at a bombed Chinese clinic, reunited with Lamour just as Tamiroff flies in with his grump act for a life saving brain operation in a field hospital!  At least, Borzage gets his moral in (‘There’s more to us than surgeons can remove,’ as Alan Jay Lerner would later put it), but this one’s hardly worth a trip to the movies let alone to war torn China.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Douglas scored in Hollywood with the hard-sell uplift of MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (’35 & ‘54) and THE ROBE/’53.  Not seen here, but more promising (at least more modest) is WHITE BANNERS/’38 with Fay Bainter, Claude Rains & Jackie Cooper.  (Now seen!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/10/white-banners-1938.html)