Trailer
Plot summary
Tom Wilder, a captain in the American Merchant Marine, spends two years in a Chinese Communist prison after his ship is seized. Unknown accomplices help him escape with bribery and a disguise as a Soviet army officer, and he is brought to Chiku Shan, a coastal village under Communist rule. Its headman, Mr. Tso, tells Wilder that he has been recruited to carry nearly 200 villagers out to Hong Kong, a free British port. He must pilot a stolen wood-burning, flat-bottomed stern-wheel riverboat, with only a coastal map drawn from memory, an unreliable magnetic compass, and no chronometer. The villagers have prepared for more than a year, raising stones along the harbor channel's bottom and gathering arms. Wilder also meets Cathy Grainger, a missionary doctor's daughter who refuses to leave without her father.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Blood Alley (1955)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Robert Mitchum was originally set to play the Merchant Marine captain, but William Wellman fired him from the production. John Wayne took the role after Gregory Peck turned the film down and Humphrey Bogart asked for a large amount of money to take it.
- The United States Air Force gave the cast and crew a Certificate of Merit for encouraging recruitment through their work in the movie, and John Wayne took the oath on the film company's behalf as an Honorary USAF Recruiter.
- The Communist patrol boat that the villagers trap on their artificial reef was not a real Red Chinese vessel but a rescue boat that the U.S. Air Force loaned to the film company.
- The film's title came from real nicknames: Blood Alley was the name of the Formosa Strait and of Rue Chu Pao-san, a short Shanghai street off Avenue Edward VII that novelist and screenwriter Albert Sidney Fleischman had visited as a sailor on the USS Albert T. Harris.
