That was an excellent one.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Set in civil war torn China in 1935, the film boasts several great actresses in it.Will someone please tell me how Sue Lyon was cast in the picture. She didn't look the type to get into mission work. We have the dependable Mildred Dunnock, as stern as ever but a heart geared toward understanding, unlike the head of the mission, Margaret Leighton, in a fabulous performance, as a strict-Christian adherent, who falls apart when the mission is over-run by savages.Anne Bancroft notches another excellent portrayal as a unhappy doctor, common, vulgar, with a no nonsense approach to life. To think, Mrs. Robinson was only a year away!Eddie Albert is basically wasted as a preacher-like minister who is killed off early. Bette Field, who played his pregnant wife, is just too old to be pregnant, even by today's standards. Nonetheless, Field brings plenty of tension, in a fine supporting performance.The ending is unsatisfying here as Dunnock finally breaks with the over-bearing Leighton, as they and several others flee the warlords.

This isn't so much a review- indeed I didn't know the film existed and I haven't seen it - as a lament for the late Norah Lofts , a writer of great power and subtlety. I can't begin to say how much it looks like Ford mangled her stirring and poignant tale (surely he was the last director on earth who should have been tackling an intricate female-nuanced situation! ) Suffice to say that Loft's Dr Cartwright, far from being some sort of pseudo man-imitating, girl-cowpoke,and American to boot, was actually an Englishwoman of education and compassion, whose outsider status derived from her non-religious stance and relatively 'liberated' attitude to personal freedom. Words fail me as to the ending ......

A jewel of a film – with superb acting in the 2 principal roles! Should be shown much more often. Failings in the set and in the minor characters are more than made up for by the vital intelligence of the presentation. The film is about religion and sex, and nothing else – and it is that simplicity that makes it fascinating. Bancroft has the role of saint and Leighton is the sinner. Is the poor exposure of this excellent film anything to do with lobbying from the churches, I wonder - after all it must be somewhat embarrassing for them to have an atheist doubling as a saint and a devout catholic doubling as a religious maniac. The saint sacrifices herself for the majority, just as Jesus was sacrificed. The sinner showed the intolerance characteristic of all religious bodies. By the way, smoking and drinking had already been established for Hollywood characters long before 1966, male and female. It was pushed by lobbying and bribery from the tobacco and alcohol industries and Bogart was a prominent and pitiful victim. So I do not see the smoking and drinking of the Bancroft character as primarily male characteristics. As for the rather muted rudeness she displayed at times, this I see as a very natural reaction to the infernal hypocrisy of the Leighton character - a 'devout catholic' who does not even believe in God – "I am looking for something that does not exist" she says. What superb realism.The end of the film is the only part I did not think satisfying or realistic – in view of the character of the doctor. She is obviously a fighter and a very courageous woman. Her final action was cowardly and not in her character at all. All that was necessary was a few more days of cajoling the chief into sufficient liberty to get a horse to match her riding breeches - there were plenty of horses around – then kill the bastard, with perhaps a few more thrown in, and make for the main gate pronto.In conclusion, the film shows a riveting clash of values in a theater piece that hardly needs any set. And the atheist comes out a clear winner. Good for you John Ford!

On the border of Mongolia in 1935, American missionaries suffer through starvation, cholera, a menopausal woman about to give birth, an attack by vicious bandits and the arrival of a chain-smoking, salty-tongued female doctor/atheist (Anne Bancroft) who usurps the power of the self-appointed leader (Margaret Leighton, whose nervous fascination with the minister's daughter, comely Sue Lyon, is vaguely lesbian in nature). Director John Ford's final film is brief and inexpensive, seemingly shot all on one sound-stage with few trimmings (when Lyon is told to take the children "into the fields," one wonders where exactly those fields are). So many different styles of acting are brought to the fore that it appears nobody knew how to approach this material. For his part, Ford may have been relishing the clashes (character and otherwise); his pacing tends to pick up whenever the conflicts threaten to get really nasty. I liked Anne Bancroft's straightforward, no-nonsense personality, Lyon is charmingly self-conscious, while Leighton is heinously hissable playing a completely unsympathetic "dictator" with high-flown manners (amusingly, she's never given a chance to redeem herself--and on at least two occasions is told to shut up--so that we nearly sympathize with her, but the screenwriter has her rigid and vile right up until the end). The climax is solid and satisfying, but filmed with a wink by Ford, as if to say "It's all b.s. anyway." ** from ****