55 Days at Peking

It's boring. Even the score by the usually reliable Dmitri Tiomkin. Just DOA.

This movie is all about a failure. There's a very small, unsatisfactory plot with no emotional resonance.

We see a small Spanish army impersonate different armies in different uniforms riding around in circles on the small set.

Heston is a generic cowboy character; we all know he hated Ava who looked ten years older than him, and there's tedious epicene Niven as a completely ineffectual handbag.

Flora Robson is magnificent, of course, wearing some magnificent costumes— but I'm unnerved by the anecdote that crazy Sam Bronshtein wanted Kate Hepburn to play the Empress— just like he got batty Bette to play a five minute cameo at Catherine The Great in his previous Europudding mess called 'John Paul Jones'.

Gay Bobby Helpmann is amusing, of course, playing the long-nailed scheming eunuch. But poor, mellow-voiced Leo Genn is wasted playing across ethic lines.

I admire Sam Bronshtein and Waszynski for trying to start up a rival to Cinecitta, Hollywood and Pinewood in Spain but he really needed better advice in scripting and casting his blockbusters.

Hollywood accounting.

It was no The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur. Did Hollywood think Epics required Charlton Heston? I'm surprised he wasn't cast in Cleopatra.

Shouldn't it be "55 Days in Peking"? Where the characters just hanging outside the city limits?

This movie is all about the Chinese laying siege to the foreign embassies in Peking. It's like Russia laying siege to the city of Kiev in Ukraine.

It's a boring, waiting game waiting for the sieged people to die, escape or surrender.

It's boring, uncinematic and makes boring movies. Charlton Heston also made the movie about the siege at Khartoum in 1964 and that was also a boring, unsatisfying movie.

Khartoum was very well done.

A siege is not that exciting, R6, imagine how boring GWTW would have been if the entire picture was about the siege and Battle of Atlanta, instead of just being one segment of the film.

[quote] Shouldn't it be "55 Days in Peking"? Where the characters just hanging outside the city limits?

It is a way of belittling 'Peking'. We say we were in New York but we were at Oxford.

[quote] Ava was luscious.

Ava had good bones. But she already had those dark lines under her eyes which made her look older than she was.

Just like gorgeous Nick Bayne has those dark lines under his eyes which make him look older than he is.

I saw it when it first came out, enjoyed it, and saw it a couple more times. One reason that may have added to its lack of box office was that, only about a month after it opened, the much awaited “Cleopatra” finally opened, and people flocked to that.

The producer told the Los Angeles Times—

[quote] I was attracted to the Boxer Rebellion because it showed "the unity of peoples, no matter what their beliefs, in the face of danger. This incident is what the United Nations symbolizes but has not yet achieved."

The United Nations is a poor analogy.

The Chinese people wanted the foreigners out of their capital and they were determined to starve them out over 55 days.

The Russians will be wanting to starve the people out of Kyev over the next month and then surrender to the Russian takeover.

Most of the DL crowd can better relate to 55 Days at Peking House. The duck is good, but the Kung Pao Chicken is to die for!

[quote] One reason that may have added to its lack of box office was that, only about a month after it opened, the much awaited “Cleopatra” finally opened…

The early 60s were the golden days for 'blockbusters'.

Some were good and others terrible but I enjoyed the color and spectacle of a big story on a big screen.

I appreciate them more now because they don't employ deceitful digital trickery which bamboozle my perceptions (such as the very messy 'Avatar').

Wiki says Bronston told Hedda Hopper he had hoped Katharine Hepburn would do the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi in March 1962. But Flora Robson was given the job in late June 1962.

I wonder if Kate would have been convincing. The Dowager Empress was as fantastic and mad and grotesque as her role as Violet Venable.