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Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing may have a myriad of problems working against it, but William Holden and Jennifer Jones aren’t among them. Holden in particular seems a little surprising here as he’s put a rest to his patented sardonic world-weary persona and embraced a more ebullient romanticism. Jones, for her part, was a chameleonic actress before such a thing was required for survival in Hollywood. She won an Oscar for her first time in a leading role and seemed to use that clout to reach far and wide to play a large variety of roles. Her plain dark features made it easy to believe her in roles in which she played a biracial character – Pearl in Duel in the Sun, or the Eurasian doctor in this come to mind. And they deliver a believable and pleasing chemistry. This type of weepy hokum seems a little beneath their talents, but neither one of them appear to be slumming, turning in performances that know how to maximize this material for mass effect.
But that’s also part of the problem. A biracial character seems radical enough for a mainstream film from the 50s, and sure enough their romance is treated as the kind of martyred and overwrought stuff of cheap dime store romances. Miscegenation may be the topic, but any racism they encounter seems heavily edited and watered down. Even Holden’s character seems a bi-product of racial attitudes, claiming to love her and appreciate their cultural differences while still making comments and jokes about chop sticks, her chosen identity and Chinese customs. All of this is heavily glossed over, but it’s there around the edges making their relationship seem less than ideally romantic as the film wants us to believe that it is.
It isn’t just the undercurrent of racial animosity that proves problematic for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, but the sheer amount of effort and musical cues that have gone in to it to make sure you know when you’re supposed to cry and how hard. The film is all artifice and bombast, a dated 50s relic more remembered for the chemistry of the leads and the title song which went to become both a big hit and an Oscar winner. If someone more cynical and sardonic like Douglas Sirk had taken hold of this film we would be having a totally different discussion. I can only imagine what a true master of candy-colored melodramas like Sirk or Nichols Ray could have and would have magically spun out of this high-camp schmaltz.
