135 Films & TV Shows Set In China During The 1940s
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Red Sorghum
Shandong Province The 1930s The 1940sAn old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.
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Fire on the Great Wall
Beijing The 1930s The 1940sHe who fights for freedom fears nothing! — Ninja Over the Great Wall takes place in the early nineteen-thirties when China was occupied by the Japanese imperial forces. Wa Chi Keung is a peasant who escaped the mass murder of his village by the Japanese. He joins his master in Bejing shortly before the old man's assassination by ninjas.
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Shanghai Surprise
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sA romantic adventure for the dangerous at heart. — Glendon Wasey is a fortune hunter looking for a fast track out of China. Gloria Tatlock is a missionary nurse seeking the curing powers of opium for her patients. Fate sets them on a hectic, exotic, and even romantic quest for stolen drugs. But they are up against every thug and smuggler in Shangai.
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Shanghai 13
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sA patriot finds evidence that the government is collaborating with a foreign power. If the people knew about the deception, they would revolt and overthrow the corrupt government. One patriot in office steals the proof and must make it out of the country. He gets assistance from a local rebel leader who is in charge of a motley group of fighters called the Shanghai 13. Not all of them can be trusted, as some of them will turn in the government official. Our weak protagonist must run a gauntlet of the who's who already mentioned.
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Yellow Earth
Shaanxi Province The 1930s The 1940sYellow earth focuses on the story of a Communist soldier who is sent to the countryside to collect folk songs for the Communist Revolution. There he stays with a peasant family and learns that the happy songs he was sent to collect do not exist; the songs he finds are about hardship and suffering. He returns to the Army, but promises to come back for the young girl, Cuiqiao, who has been spellbound by his talk of the freedom women have under Communist rule and who wants to join the Communist Army.
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Hong Kong 1941
🇭🇰 Hong Kong 🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sYears later, a woman narrates her personal story of the Japanese takeover of Hong Kong in 1941. She's Nam, young, attractive, daughter of a wealthy rice merchant, and prey to painful, disabling seizures. Her boyhood friend is Coolie Keung, whose family used to have wealth; he's now impoverished, a tough kid, a leader, in love with her. Into the mix steps Fay, cool and resourceful, an actor from the north, intent on getting to Gold Mountain in the US or Australia. They form a threesome, but the day they are to leave Hong Kong, the invasion stops them. Fay must rescue Keung from collaborators, Nam falls in love with Fay, and danger awaits their next attempt to escape. Written by
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Shanghai Blues
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sIn 1937 Shanghai, a soon-to-depart soldier meets a young woman under a bridge during a Japanese air raid. They vow to meet after the war ends, but they don't know each other's name or face. Ten years later, the young woman, a nightclub singer, takes in a naive girl fresh from the country. The country girl falls in love with the would-be song-writer upstairs who, unbeknownst to the singer, is none other than the soldier from the bridge.
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One And Eight
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sDirector Zhang Junzhao's superbly tense revisionist war film (featuring striking cinematography from future Fifth Generation standard bearer Zhang Yimou) is widely considered to be the first work of Mainland Fifth Generation cinema.
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Portrait of a Fanatic
🇨🇳 China The 1970s The 1960s The 1940s The 1930sIn 1949 when the Communist regime was established in China, the world-famed painter Ling Chen-kuang, believing his conviction for a new-born society had come true on his motherland, returned anxiously from the U.S., whither he had fled apprehension by lawmen when cracking down on rebellious activities he had actively engaged in out of cynicism and hostility – the feelings evolved from constant haunting by the memories of his childhood miserableness – to the then existing institutions in China. Alas, to his disillusion, the land he had so deeply loved, the society of which he had expected so much, should have turned out to be the hell on earth. Why? The enigma kept obsessing and puzzling him even to his dying moment.
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The Xi'an Incident
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sMarshal Zhang Xueliang, Commander of the North Eastern Army, grows progressively disillusioned by Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek's policy to engage the Chinese Communist Party rather than fight the Japanese invaders which are occupying Manchuria. Despite numerous pleas, Chiang does not budge. After discussing with fellow general Yang Hucheng, the two take events into their own hands and place Chiang Kai-shek under arrest on December 12, 1936, forcing Chiang into a coalition with the CCP.
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Heroes of the East
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sGordon Liu stars as a Chinese martial arts student struggling to relate to his new Japanese wife. When a series of martial misunderstandings spirals into an international incident, he's forced to take on seven of Japan's most powerful martial arts masters, each an expert in a different discipline, ranging from karate to samurai to ninjitsu.
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Heroes of the Eastern Skies
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sThe true story of a small group of Chinese flying aces in 1937 at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, specifically the Battle of Shanghai and the Battle of Nanking.
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7-Man Army
Beijing The 1930s The 1940sIn 1933, 20,000 Japanese soldiers and 50 tanks invaded the Pa Tou Lou Tzu, a strategic key point of the Great Wall. With only seven men stationing, these heroes took on the entire army for five days before succumbing. Director Chang Cheh recreated this epic battle with his favorite cast including Ti Lung, David Chiang, Alexander Fu Sheng and Chen Kuan-tai, as a celluloid tribute to these nameless souls.
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The Everlasting Glory
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sA most touching and consistently heart-gripping war drama depicts the heroic deeds of General Chang Tsu-chung who was even held in high esteem and dubbed as “Mars of China” by his Japanese counterpart, General Itagaki during Sino-Japanese war.
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Eight Hundred Heroes
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sThe film is based on the true story of a regiment of nationalist troop fighting Japanese forces several times of their strength. Due to the political reasons, such historical topic is avoided in China, and even after the reform, the cautious approach needs outside help from Hong Kong, but such attempts still deserves a great salute.
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The Champion
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sA recently jailed martial arts master teams up with a wronged woman to take down the man's brother, a coal baron who rules a small town with an iron fist.
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Fist of Fury
Shanghai The 1910s The 1930s The 1940sBruce Lee has done the impossible... ...HE'S SURPASSED HIMSELF!!! — Chen Zhen returns to the international compound of China only to learn of his beloved teacher's death. This is compounded by the continual racist harassment by the Japanese population in the area. Unlike his friends, he confronts it head on with his mastery of martial arts while investigating his teacher's murder.
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Hapkido
🇰🇷 South Korea 🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sHere Comes the Unbreakable China Doll Who Gives You the Licking of Your Life! — Korea, 1934. During the Japanese occupation, there is open warfare between rival martial arts schools. There is a fight in the marketplace, and three Chinese students can't stand the unfair way of students that side up with the invasors, when they gang assault one of the fighting men. Between the three, they send the aggressors away. Retaliation is heavy: their school is destroyed, and they are banished. They return to China, and start their own school, and set out on good-will visits to the other martial arts schools, only to find that everybody in their neighbourhood is already dominated by the Japanese. They have many kung fu fights to win, before they eventually manage to establish peace.
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Lady Whirlwind
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sA young woman determines to help a man who is being pursued by gangsters, so that she would have the pleasure of killing him herself as revenge for causing the death of her sister.
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Red Angel
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sIn 1939, Sakura Nishi is a young army nurse who is sent to the field hospitals in China during the Sino-Japanese war. She has to assist the surgeon Dr. Okabe with an incredible number of amputations. In the crowded wards, she gives sympathy to some of the soldiers, including sexually servicing one who has lost both arms and has no hope of returning home. She falls in love with Dr. Okabe, and follows him to the front, even though he is impotent from his morphine addiction
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The East Is Red
Tibet The 1920s The 1930s The 1940sPre-Cultural Revolution propaganda at its most lavish, this model opera depicts the history and evolution of the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong from its founding in July 1921 to the establishment of "New China" in 1949. Detailed in the musical are several key events in CPC history such as the Northern Expedition, the KMT-led Shanghai massacre of 1927, the Nanchang Uprising and formation of the People's Liberation Army, the Long March and the founding of the PRC on October 1, 1949.
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Tunnel Warfare
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sA small town defends itself from the Japanese by use of a network of tunnels during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
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The Mountain Road
🇨🇳 China The 1940s The 1930sFlaming skies... blasted earth... the touch of love! — In 1944, in eastern part of China, U.S.Army Major Baldwin and his volunteer team of demolition engineers are left behind the retreating Chinese forces. Their task is to slow down the Japanese advance into eastern China by blowing up bridges, roads, airfields and munitions dumps. They start by blowing up an American airfield and ammo dump. They receive the order to destroy a vital bridge over a mountain pass.The team uses a few army trucks to move around. At the bridge, they encounter a Nationalist Chinese Army unit in charge of guarding the bridge. Thanks to an American soldier who speaks some Chinese, Major Baldwin requests the permission, from the Chinese commander, to blow up the bridge.The Chinese colonel agrees but asks the American Major to do him a favor by also destroying a munitions dump located at some distance away.He also requests that Madame Sue-Mei Hung, the widow of a Chinese colonel, be transported by the American demolition team to the nearest major town.
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The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
Shanxi Province The 1930s The 1940sAll her life Englishwoman Gladys Aylward knew that China was the place where she belonged. Not qualified to be sent there as a missionary, Gladys works as a domestic to earn the money to send herself to a poor, remote village. There she eventually lives a full and happy life: running the inn, acting as "foot inspector", advising the local Mandarin and even winning the heart of mixed race Captain Lin Nan. But Gladys discovers her real destiny when the country is invaded by Japan and the Chinese children need her to save their lives. Based on a true story.
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China Doll
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sA Great Adventure out of the desperate days of the Famous Flying Tigers ! — American pilot Cliff Brandon, fighting the Japanese in China, finds himself the unintentional "owner" of a Chinese housekeeper, Shu-Jen. The unlikely couple falls in love and marries, but not without tragedy brought on by the war.
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