Sendero de furia

Legendary American reporter Theodore H. White covered China in the 1940s, and he wrote the novel on which this unusual James Stewart feature is based. It's not quite anti-war, but it's a very long way from the flag-waving military movies that Stewart made in the 1950s.

Stewart's character is a U.S. military engineer working with a small team trying to slow a Japanese advance in China. Though there's plenty of action (especially explosions), the emphasis is on the Americans' interaction with their Chinese allies -- which is fraught with problems. Stewart's character has a local love interest, played by Lisa Lu, but their relationship is nothing like a conventional GI romance.

"The Mountain Road" was obviously meant to be a thought-provoking look back at World War II, and to audiences in the early 1960s it probably was. The climax may have been almost shocking. In today's more jaded world, the movie is likely to strike many viewers as dull, with an ending that resolves very little. But it you still have a rose-colored view of the "Greatest War," and think it was less morally messy than our current conflicts, this could be enlightening.