1943, United States. Starring Anna May Wong, Noel Madison, Leslie Denison, Nedrick Young, Dan Seymour, Frank Lackteen, Teala Loring, Dennis Moore, Connie Leon, Hayward Soo Hoo, Richard Loo. Directed by Joseph Lewis.

Throughout the golden era of Hollywood cinema, there was always a cheap, seedy shadow world of films that were produced down and dirty and on the ultra-cheap in order to fill the undercard at the local theater. Although these films usually plied the same waters as their bigger budget counterparts in terms of story elements and archetypes, there was a definite difference in quality between the A game and these Poverty Row "B movies." But this doesn't stop a lot of these ultra-cheap quickies from having their charms.

Because they lacked the budgets of the banner films, they often relied on crude shooting at real locations, generally guerrilla style without permits or much in the way of set-up. While the results can often be poorly lit as a result, you also get a unique glimpse at the actual streets, buildings, and people of the time, as opposed to a much nice looker though more stylized set that you would get in a film that had access to a backlot and money to construct its own Los Angeles.

Bombs Over Burma is definitely a cheap film, and it rides on the coattails of the bigger budget, higher profile war movies that came out to support the allied cause during World War II. But it also contains something that is always of great appeal to me no matter how tastelessly or cheaply it may be realized: Oriental intrigue. Inscrutable Asians and sinister "Oriental" locations were the bread and butter of a lot of Poverty Row productions, and honestly, the cheap exoticism and mystery of such films always pulls me in. Opium dens, damned souls, secret passages, assassins with curved blade knives -- I love this stuff, regardless of how wrong this Sax Rohmer inspired exotica may be.

During World War II, a number of these films did their best to differentiate between the good Asians -- specifically the heroic Chinese, who were fighting on the side of the Allies but were like little kids who needed our help (what, you know, with them having one of the oldest societies in the world), and the dastardly Japanese who palled around with the Axis Powers and needed a swift kick in their tail. in the case of Bombs Over Burma, we get a heroic Chinese woman named Lin Ying, played by the lovely and talented b-movie staple Anna May Wong, who must discover who among a small group of people stranded at a monastery in the Burmese countryside is responsible for radioing in convoy information to the Japanese air force. Chief among her suspects is the shifty head monk Me-hoi, played by the decidedly un-Asian Noel Madison, whose Asian make-up looks like it later went on to inspire whoever slapped all that make-up onto the main villain in Jean-Claude Van Damme's Kickboxer. But there are plenty of other stiffs on hand to muddy the waters and making the identification of the spy difficult.

Bombs Over Burma is a necessarily simple film. It didn't have the money to be anything else. So we get only a couple locations -- a town, the countryside, and then the antechambers of the monastery. There's very little action until the very end, and most of the actors are hardly capable enough to support such a dialog-heavy tale of espionage and intrigue. But overall, the film is still a cut above most other cheap war and spy movies from the era, thanks in large part to the presence of Anna May Wong. She was a fixture on the screen during the silent era, in roles that varied widely both in terms of quality and quantity, but she has since become one of the defining names and faces of the silent era, even if she isn't quite ranked as high as actresses like Lillian Gish, Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, or really, even Josephine Baker. Mmmmm, Josephine Baker...

Forgive me. My mind wandered briefly. Anyway, it seemed for a while that Anna May Wong and Keye Luke were the only two actual Asians in any Hollywood movie, and everyone else just put on fake eyelids. May's role in this cheapie is pretty substantial, and most of the job of carrying the movies falls on her shoulders, though there's always a stiff white guy on hand to dole out a herky-jerky punch to the jaw of the baddie when it's called for. In the case of this film, the role is fulfilled by a guy named Ned Young as Slim Jenkins -- which is just about the most perfect "stiff white guy" name he could have had.

With so few quality actors on hand, and no money for staging battle scenes, the film relies on an intimate air of menace once the drama shifts to the monastery and the attempt to unmask the spy. In this sense, the film succeeds will realtive to its modest means. We get the de rigeur "Asia stuff" set decoration, the sinister knives, and some secret passages, which was more than enough to keep me satisfied as the film wound its way through a series of shifty eyes and shadowy sneaking about that leads to a surprisingly satisfying climax.

Director Joseph Lewis does a nice job of keeping up the pace. he was a stalwart workman director who didn't deliver too much that was flashy but knew how to get the job done properly. Although he worked in a lot of these cheap films, he's also responsible for helming at least one genuine classic, the 1950 noir masterpiece Gun Crazy.

All in all, as far as these cheap old B-movie adventure and espionage films go, Bombs Over Burma is pretty reliable filler. Anna May Wong is charming enough, even at this later stage in her career and despite her sometimes shaky English, to carry the film up until the point when Slim has to punch some people. There is certainly nothing lavish or opulent about the film, but it's an enjoyable excursion never the less.