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55 Days at Peking Wikipedia

55 Days at Peking is an action-cum-historical film released in 1963. It was produced by Samuel Bronston, and directed by Nicholas Ray, Andrew Marton (credited as the second-unit director), and Guy Green (director)|Guy Green (uncredited). It starred Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, David Niven, Flora Robson, John Ireland (actor)|John Ireland, Leo Genn, Robert Helpmann, Kurt Kasznar, Paul Lukas, Elizabeth Sellars, Harry Andrews, Jerome Thor, Jacques Sernas, Philippe LeRoy, Massimo Serato, and Walter Gotell. The director Nicholas Ray also played a small role, as the American ambassador.

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The film is a dramatization of the Boxer Rebellion which took place in 1900 China. Fed up by foreign encroachment, the Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi uses the Boxer secret societies to attack the foreigners within China,
culminating in the siege on the foreign legations compounds in Beijing. The film title refers to the length of the defense by the colonial powers of the legations district of Beijing (the film concentrates on the defence of the legations from the point of view of the foreign powers). The film is considered politically incorrect by some as it gives little background on how the colonial powers were subdividing China after some humiliating defeats during the Opium Wars, which were the provocations that drove the Chinese.

The film maintains a certain curiosity value for cinephiles due to its credited director Nicholas Ray. Best known for his 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, Ray was a tortured individual at the time of the production of 55 Days at Peking, somewhat akin to the Dean persona he helped to create for Rebel. Paid a lot of money by producer Samuel Bronston to direct 55 Days, Ray had an inkling that taking on the project, a massive epic, would mean the end of him and that he would never direct another film again. This premonition proved correct. Ray collapsed on the set half-way through the shooting and not only never finished the film but never directed another feature (though in fact he did make in 1979, with Wim Wenders, the feature-length Lightning Over Water aka Nick's Movie, which recorded the last moments of his life).

According to the writer and critic Stephen Teo, the opening scene in 55 Days at Peking showing various Western powers playing their respective national anthems causing a din in the Peking marketplace was "quoted" by the Hong Kong director Tsui Hark in his 1991 film Once Upon a Time in China (Chinese title: Huang Feihong): see Teo's essay "Tsui Hark: National Style and Polemic" in Esther C. M. Yau (ed.) At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 158.

Category:1963 films
Category:War films
Category:Chinese history in film

Last Modified:   2005-11-04