Attack on a China Mission (1900)

Very disappointing...

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

It was still a while until the beginning of World War I when this was made, but in film war already became a subject. This one here, which runs slightly over a minute depicts exactly what the title says. I cannot say watching this film gave me anything more than reading the title, but there are a couple factors that still make it a mediocre watch at least. First of all, not all movies had acting at this point. It's a plus that this one did. And also it has actually really many actors, which was probably not so easy to get them to do exactly what the filmmaker wanted. The filmmaker here is James Williamson, probably the very first Scottish director and also one of the most prolific easily, maybe the most prolific actually. It's maybe worth a watch for people who enjoy war movies to see what they looked like 115 years ago, but for the rest it#s really not worth a watch.

Some of the previous reviewers have perhaps read more into this simple film than was intended by the maker.I think that it was intended as a simple "action" film for entertainment rather than a comment on the Chinese.The Boxer Rebellion was recent news, and many lurid accounts had appeared in the newspapers.The Boxers had done things just like depicted in the film.The film was made in England,explaining the architecture of the house.However, Europeans living in China often built their homes in the style of their own countries,so this is not unrealistic for China of the period.Claire Lee Chennault,leader of the Flying Tigers,in his memoirs mentioned French villas looming up incongruously out of the countryside around Kunming.

In 1900, it would have been pretty ambitious to tell a fairly involved story like this in a short motion picture. It's hard to evaluate "Attack on a China Mission", in part because it tries to do more than it accomplishes, and in part because portions of the complete film seem not to have been preserved. (And what is preserved also shows definite signs of physical deterioration.)The story is set in the Boxer Rebellion, which would still have been fresh in the public's mind at the time this movie was made. Otherwise, it would be hard or impossible to determine the context of events or the motivations of the characters from the film alone. There is plenty of action, and some good camera shots of it as well, although the course of events is sometimes a little chaotic. Still, it does tell a complete story, as far as it goes.Given the limited resources and techniques then available, telling a story like this was an enterprising idea. Most of the other Williamson films of the era are of good quality, and it seems likely that this one might also have been a good one in its original or complete form. What survives of it is flawed, but still somewhat interesting.

This exciting action film offers a template for subsequent siege masterpieces, such as 'Rio Bravo' and 'Straw Dogs'. The narrative is beautifully simple and encapsulated in the title. In its steady focus on action, without reference to history, the film might seem to be ideologically free, abstracting the conflict (between colonists and Boxers) in the way Buster Keaton does in 'The General'. After all, its just one group attacking the other, we don't know the reasons or values of either's cause.The film is in fact heavily weighted in a way subsequently influential on Hollywood cinema as a whole. Although it doesn't indulge in the 'Yellow Peril' racism that would mar Hollywood in the forthcoming decades, the title suggests a point of view, an attack on a mission, something violent and destructive on something stable and Christian. The fact that it's a 'Chinese' mission suggests that the Chinese aggressors are in some way attacking themselves. A fairer, if less crowd-pleasing, title might have been 'Justifiable Revolt against White Imperialists'.Visually, the film bears this out. The missionaries are linked to the house, the solid, property, and to heterosexual normality (there are men and women); surrounded by trees and growth, they are natural, rooted, good bourgeois. The Boxers come from nowhere; they have no other purpose other than destruction; no family, religious or social ties; they hack down nature, or represent its more sinister manifestation, as their gun play creates gorgeous swirls of dust that obscure the peculiarly English country house.Of course, there is an ambiguity here that the action cinema has never really resolved - the need to assert conservative values conflicting with the need for action, destruction, violence, above all, change. The film only becomes exciting when the Boxers charge in; and when one of the dear old ladies runs comically screaming to an upstairs balcony, you wonder which side the director is actually on.