To maintain their thriving B-movie unit required Columbia Pictures to keep a full-speed-ahead attitude at all times, rarely if ever allowing for the luxury of reflection, introspection or doubt as their long-term contractees beavered to bang out the product. If the studio's second-string features were derivative, cheap, or indifferently acted by a cast of has-beens and unknowns, that was a problem for the critics. By the time any one title had been lauded or savaged, five or ten more had been cranked out in its wake. Such was certainly the case with China Corsair (1951), which tacks heavily traveled waters charted in earlier years by the likes of Seven Sinners (1940), Casablanca (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944) and its semi-remake The Breaking Point (1950). Set in the South China Sea, on an island floating downwater from Hong Kong whose grimy port is a magnet for "the scum of the Far East, male and female – of every tongue and color," China Corsair is a bog standard smuggling scenario particularized, at least in retrospect, by its casting of a future Hollywood heavyweight.

Although China Corsair is often cited as Ernest Borgnine's film debut he had appeared previously as a union organizer buddy to working class hero Lloyd Bridges in The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951). The Dover, New Hampshire location of Robert Siodmak's labor drama was an easy commute for the East Coast actor, then dividing his time between company roles for Pennsylvania's Barter Theatre and appearing in the Broadway production of Harvey with wide-mouthed comic Joe E. Brown. A screen test in New York led to a Columbia contract and a role as a waterfront thug in The Mob (1951) with Broderick Crawford – but first the studio plugged Borgnine into China Corsair.

To play the Chinese permitee of a gambling house, Borgnine was squeezed into a Mandarin hat and tunic and made to wear painful eye lifts from 4 am until 7 pm on shooting days. Additionally, the actor found himself clashing with autocratic director Ray Nazarro, known principally as a specialist in westerns. The Boston-born Nazarro's career extended back to the silent era and he had by this time adopted the Continental habit of wearing his suit jacket over his shoulders and demanding absolute deference from his hirelings. Projecting onto Borgnine the association of New York actors with being difficult, Nazarro sought to intimidate the Hollywood newbie by calling for a scene to be shot that hadn't been scheduled (and for which the actors were unprepared). Excusing himself for fifteen minutes, Borgnine returned to the set and executed the scene perfectly in one take, after which he had no further trouble with his director.

Leading man Jon Hall (born Charles Hall Locher in Fresno, California in 1913) had enjoyed a brief popularity after playing the loin-clothed lead of John Ford's The Hurricane (1937). By the time of China Corsair, Hall's waistline had spread and his matinee idol had coarsened, making him appear considerably older than his 38 years. Never comfortable in front of the camera, Hall would soon retire from show business to run a number of private businesses, among them a flying school. Plagued by terminal bladder cancer, he committed suicide in North Hollywood in 1979.

Second-billed Lisa Ferraday was less famous for her acting than for whom she was photographed with on the town. The dark-eyed Transylvania-born (as Elizabeth de Mesey) beauty was paired in the tabloids with all manner of men, from suave, bookish Franchot Tone to burly, hard-living Broderick Crawford and later made scandal sheet headlines by feuding with her Death of a Scoundrel (1956) costar Zsa Zsa Gabor. Ferraday's career was short-lived; she married well and retired to Florida, where she died in March 2004.

Australian émigré Ron Randell was a former second string Bulldog Drummond and Lone Wolf at Columbia but is in shadier form in China Corsair as Ferraday's exporter paramour. Randell's last film role was as Nastassja Kinski's father in James Toback's Exposed (1983) but he continued working in theatre before his death in Los Angeles in June 2005. A quintessential Rockwell American, John Dehner fails to persuade as Latin cutthroat Pedro, towering as he does over every other actor, but Philip Ahn (as a doomed antiques dealer) brings to the production a much-needed dash of ethnic authenticity. Look fast for Amanda Blake (later the high-kicking Miss Kitty of TV's Gunsmoke) as Ron Randell's secretary.

However indebted China Corsair may be to earlier and frankly better port city dramas, it's a credit to director Ray Nazarro that the film clips along at a brisk pace and is never boring. Early business set in the neighborhood of Borgnine's gambling house make good use of a standing medieval set on the Columbia lot and when the action switches to the open sea the film looks cheaper but paradoxically feels more alive and spontaneous. The cynical script by Harold Greene (who helped cook up the story for Phil Karlson's Kansas City Confidential, 1952) is hard on blood relations and romantic love (Hall's spurned sailor squeezes a wallet-sized photo of the woman who done him wrong as if it were a stress reliever) and by the final fade-out 90 percent of the character roster of the desperate and the duplicitous is dead in the drink. Beat that, Casablanca!

Producer: Rudolph C. Flothow
Director: Ray Nazarro
Screenplay: Harold Greene
Cinematography: Philip Tannura
Film Editing: Richard Fantl
Art Direction: Victor Greene
Music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff
Cast: Jon Hall (McMillan), Lisa Ferraday (Tamara Liu Ming), Ernest Borgnine (Hu Chang), Marya Marco (Lotus), John Dehner (Pedro), Ron Randell (Paul Lowell).
BW-76m.

by Richard Harland Smith

Sources:
Ernest Borgnine interview by Clyde Jeavons
GlamorGirlsoftheSilverScreen.com
The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz