Lux Radio Theater: China (starring Alan Ladd and Loretta Young)
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Alan Ladd and twenty girls - trapped by the rapacious Japs!
From 1934 to 1955, after Hollywood stars made movies, they reprised their roles on the Lux Radio Theater.
On November 22, 1943 Alan Ladd and Loretta Young went into the CBS studios to broadcast the radio version of their topical film China.
Alan Ladd plays Mr. Jones, a cynical oil hawker in China in 1941, who thinks the “Japs” are good customers. He runs into Loretta Young’s Carolyn Grant, a teacher in Chengdu, whose girls are the hope of the new China for which the brave Chinese soldiers fight.
As Mr. Jones is trying to get to Shanghai and falling for Miss Grant (of course), he sees an orphan baby he and his traveling companions had picked up and named “Donald Duck” killed, along with old women, by barbaric Japanese forces. The climax comes on December 10, 1941, when Mr. Jones finds out, from a smug Japanese general, that the Japanese “like America very much. So much that we’re going to take it away from you,” and that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor three days before.
With its depiction of the indiscriminate Japanese bombing of villages and the muderous
rampage of the Japanese Army, and a passing mention of the Nanking massacre, the film is purely of its time, down to the Chinese characters speaking English well, while the Japanese characters speak with thick accents and limited vocabularies. In other words, it was propaganda designed to show Americans that the war in China was their war, too.
The recording is, unfortunately, not in the best state, there’s a brief dead spot about 2/3 of the way through, but it’s clearly audible and a fascinating bit of wartime radio.
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