This director takes all the right steps in this movie. He doesn't depict the Japanese as cardboard villains, but as men who want to see themselves as honorable and just precisely because they view the Chinese as lesser animals. Most important, Spottiswoode doesn't rush to the stirring finale of Hogg's long march: it arrives, just in time, as the culmination of Hogg's humane labors as the orphans' headmaster. The snowy mountains and the expanse of Chinese desert are visually so fresh and new to Western movies that you feel in your bones Hogg has given his charges a fresh start.
The Canadian-born, cosmopolitan Spottiswoode proves an ideal director for the tale of an Englishman who helped the Chinese by remaining his own man.
michael.sragow@baltsun.com
