The Mountain Road

A small American demolition crew is tasked to withdraw along a mountain road in China, and if they can, slow the advancing Japanese Army. Major Baldwin is in his first field command, and he's determined that they will slow the Japanese. He's also pressed into escorting the wife (Lisa Lu) of a deceased Chinese general to safety.

Baldwin says near the end that he let the power he was given, the power of command, go to his head. Which doesn't seem accurate. There's some grumbling from his men about bothering with the delaying actions, but it never turns into a Mutiny on the Bounty situation.

What does seem to be the issue is that Baldwin does not understand China, which doesn't stop him from judging it. He mentions to Madame Hung at one point that he doesn't understand the brutality in China. I was left thinking about how, when the road was blocked by an old man whose truck full of cotton had broken down, Baldwin told the man they'd push his truck up the hill, and then pushed it into the ravine instead. Or the people who were blocked from escaping when Baldwin and his men blew a bridge, or dropped a bluff in the road. His men got a good laugh at all those angry peasants.

But when someone bushwhacks some of his men and kills them, then it's time for revenge. I guess you could argue that Baldwin deciding he needs to take time for this (and blows up an innocent village in the process), instead of finishing his withdrawal, is him letting the power of command go to his head. His men didn't need much convincing, though. But it still feels like it comes down to Baldwin not understanding the country he's in, or what the people there are dealing with. The majority of the people are desperate, and some of them resort to violence. But Baldwin just lumps them all together as some faceless mass that should be grateful he's working to "save" them, when he isn't really doing that at all.

The movie goes in a couple of directions I didn't expect, avoids a few things I expected it to do. They start to tease a romance between Baldwin and Madame Hung, but his actions and contempt for the Chinese actually cause problems and wreck it before it gets off the ground. Which makes perfect sense to me, but there are a lot of movies where guys do incredibly shitty stuff, and women are written to basically shrug it off.