Copyright 3 December 1942 by 20th Century-Fox Film Corp. New York opening at the Roxy: 20 January 1943. U.S. release: 9 December 1942. Australian release: 18 November 1943. 8,736 feet. 97 minutes.OPENING SYNOPSIS: Johnny Williams (George Montgomery), an American newsreel photographer captured by the Japs in China, makes a breath-taking escape with the aid of a tough soldier-of-fortune, Major Weed (Victor McLaglen), and the Major's girl-friend, Captain Fifi (Lynn Bari).NOTES: Domestic rentals gross: $1.4 million. Although this wasn't sufficient to put the movie into the topmost branches of the box-office tree, it's a most respectable total - more money in fact that either Ninotchka or Grapes of Wrath or even The Women took on original release in the U.S./Canada. PRINCIPAL MIRACLE: Hathaway, Hecht and company turn wartime propaganda into first-rate entertainment.COMMENT: Even by Hathaway's highly polished standard, this is a stylishly fascinating entry in the wartime propaganda mill. The camerawork and the lighting are absolutely out of this world. We can't imagine why the movie wasn't nominated for any of the year's major awards. The sets are really magnificent too. In fact, I'll go further. I'd say that the sets would rank amongst the finest (the most artistic, the most imaginative, the most eye-catching, the most aesthetically appealing) ever created for a motion picture. But no awards. Not even a nomination. True, there's one thing - and only one thing - about China Girl that's not top-flight, and that's Ben Hecht's cornball script, with its stereotyped characterization and strictly conventional brash-American-boy-meets-beautiful-but-elusive-Eurasian-girl romance. All the same, Miss Tierney is suitably beautiful as the heroine and Mr Montgomery routinely brash as the diamond-in-the-rough hero. The supporting cast, however, is even more interesting, with some fine studies in villainy from Bari, McLaglen, Rumann and Baxter.OTHER VIEWS: Superbly photographed, well played, with great art direction (the hotel set is most ingenious and imaginative), stylish direction, snappy dialogue, and a good music score (abetted by that great 20th Century-Fox sound track), this film lacks only one thing - a satisfactory conclusion. SPOILERS: This must be one of the few Hollywood films in which justice does not triumph. Although this is certainly a novel idea, the conclusion doesn't even cash in on this novelty because it's blatant propaganda swamps any other ideas out of an audience's mind. Great supporting cast. Pace is A-1 too, and the plot moves like a crackerjack until about halfway through. It's Gene Tierney who slows down the action; but she's so beautifully lit and costumed, we don't really care. - JHR writing as George Addison.

As in most films produced during the war years, at least those that focused on Asian locales, China Girl probably had two important functions when it was made. The first, of course, was to entertain audiences with action and romance, to be profitable, the second was to serve the US war effort though, sadly, there was never much of a US effort made to actually help China until late in the war. In this film George Montgomery--described by some critics as the actor chosen after Montgomery Cliff or Tyrone Power refused the role-- plays a rakish hustler out to profit from the chaos of war. After escaping Japanese controlled China, he lands in Burma where he meets his China Girl, played by Gene Tierney who looks not a bit like a Chinese woman. While there is some attempt to inject other elements to the plot, Japanese agents and even a "love triangle", these seem superficially installed for their melodrama and don't do much to draw the viewer into the story. A major part of the plot is that true love can absolve moral failings. How sweet! There are logistical and factual problems with the story-line: the hero says he has just fled a Japanese military base in Luchow, located in Sichuan, where the Japanese army never advanced to; a World War I vintage biplane carries its passengers several hundred miles over mountainous terrain, surely well beyond such a plane's range; a dispute over destinations has the hero arguing that they will go to Kunming, not Yunnan (Kunming is in the center of Yunnan); the hero and his gal take an evening stroll to the Dhammayan Temple vicinity, about a hundred miles from Mandalay, where they are supposed to be. But one would not expect Hollywood scriptwriters to be familiar with Asian geography,and viewers of that era even less so.All in all, a mediocre effort to depict a trans-continental romance set against the background of horrendous human tragedy in WW II China. There were some good films made during this period, but this is not one of them.

I was very eager to see this film because it had one of my favorite actresses (Gene Tierney) in it. I started watching it and was so turned off by George Montgomery, who imitates Clark Gable through the whole thing, that once she was on screen, I was hoping it would be over soon. Needless to say I watched it for awhile and finally turned it off. Bad film. Would not recommend.

Probably "China Girl" is a movie for cinephiles (I'm not one of them, though). Hathaway is a high-level film-maker, McLaglen, Montgomery, Lynn Bari, Ruman are gifted and nice actors. The black-and-white photography is beautiful: the scenes inside the colonial hotel are indeed very evocative. Even the plot is better than one may expect and presents a noble finale. At any rate, it is so pleasant to see a film with no beastly violence and trash talk which are routine in current movies. Of course, for us happy people Gene Tierney's fans, the main recommendation for "China Girl" is the presence of our Goddess of Love and Beauty. Beyond her incomparable beauty and loveliness, Gene shows her usual (underrated) talent as an actress: with her sad dreaming eyes, her rare sweet smiles, her refusal to give way to love, even her bravery in sharing her unhappy people's sufferences, she instills in the audience the foreboding of her bitter fate.