Rating summary
| Movie |  | 3.5 |
| Video |  | 4.0 |
| Audio | | 3.5 |
| Extras |  | 0.0 |
| Overall |  | 3.0 |
In Harm's Way Blu-ray Movie Review
Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson July 11, 2020
Emile Hirsch first caught my attention when he starred in Sean Penn's wildlife drama, Into the Wild (2007), which some friends and I saw at a nearby art cinema. While Hirsch's performance as Chris McCandless is praiseworthy, the narrative and sound track didn't work for me that well and I believe Penn has made superior films as a director. I've also enjoyed Hirsch's work in Alpha Dog (2006), Milk (2008), Savages (2012), Lone Survivor (2013), Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), among a few others. Early in his career, Hirsch delivered a tender and sensitive performance as the reticent title character in The Mudge Boy (2003), a queer teen romance that hardly anyone saw. Bille August's In Harm's Way (2017) is another indie starring Hirsch that next-to no one saw in the West. It went through a series of title changes. August's seventeenth feature was released in the UK as The Hidden Soldier. When it premiered at the 20th Shanghai International Film Festival three years ago, it was re-titled The Chinese Widow. In a controversial decision, it was chosen to open the festival over Ann Hui's Our Time Will Come (2017), which covers roughly the same geography and period during WWII. (The Hui picture has been better received by the critical mass.) Curiously, Shout! Factory re-titled it In Harm’s Way for home video, which is an oddity because it isn't a remake of Preminger's eponymous 1965 epic, although it superficially shares some plot elements.
Army Air pilot Jack (Emile Hirsch) is sent on a bombing mission over Tokyo and is purportedly scheduled to land in Kuomintang China. But a major misunderstanding among the Chinese Nationalists launches a preemptive attack, sending Jack's plane down to a forest in the Zhejiang province. Ying (Yifei Liu), a widow whose husband was killed in the war, is out on a stroll with her smart and perky daughter, Nunu (Fangcong Li), to pick silkworms. Nun notices a parachute trooper stuck high up in the tree. Ying enlists Kai (Kevin Yan), the village headman and her husband’s childhood friend, to retrieve the unconscious man from the tree limb. Jack somehow has survived and is taken to a cave while he rests and recovers. Japanese captain Shimamoto (Tsukagoshi Hirotaka) is seeking American MIAs that Chinese villagers may be harboring and doesn't take kindly to Kai's denials. Ying furtively moves Jack underneath the floorboard of her home. Shimamoto begins to suspect that Nunu knows about Jack's whereabouts and after querying her at school, he pays her mother a couple of visits. Will Shimamoto uncover Jack in the basement and can Ying get him safely to a rescue boat?
While
In Harm’s Way is a slow burn, August does a decent job of very gradually developing Jack's relationship with Ying and her daughter. He deftly shows how they struggle to communicate over language barriers and cultural norms. Apparently, Greg Latter's screenplay got trimmed and I only wish the film could have been longer to flesh out some supporting characters. Fionnuala Halligan of
Screen Daily reported that Vivian Wu was supposed to appear as the old Nunu but her role was cut.
In Harm's Way Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality
Shout! Factory presents In Harm's Way in its original theatrical exhibition ratio of 2.40:1 on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25. Festival prints were known to exhibit washed-out tones in the aerial combat sequences and that's evident here (see Screenshot #s 11, 13, & 14). The VFX look more like static matte paintings and lugs way behind the current cinema's CGI. When the movie shifts to Zhejiang, the bamboo forest's hues are lush and atmospheric (see capture #s 4, 5, 9, 16, 17, & 19). Generally, the movie is fairly dark and dreary-looking. There are no print flaws or compression issues. Shout! has encoded the feature at a mean video bitrate of 25487 kbps.
The 97-minute film receives Shout!'s customary twelve scene selections.
In Harm's Way Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality
Shout! supplies a Mandarin/English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround (3362 kbps, 24-bit) and a Mandarin/English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo downconversion (1674 kbps, 24-bit). Spoken words are a mixture of English and Mandarin. Shout! provides the English subs where they're needed. There's also a separate track for English SDH. The surrounds receive the best workout for the aerial bombing raids in the first reel and a gun battle in the forest late in the film. Nature sounds also have an active presence along the rears. For some reason, my SR periodically made a static noise. My speaker is fully wired in the so this may be an anomaly inherent in the recording.
In Harm's Way Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras
There are no extras on this disc.
In Harm's Way Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation
In Harm's Way is a slowly developed wartime romance between a Chinese widow and American GI that's beautifully filmed exempting the poorly designed CGI. Danish filmmaker Bille August is likely best known in the US for the Oscar-winning Pelle the Conqueror (1987), The House of the Spirits (1993), and Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997). In Harm's Way is surely a minor but still worthwhile work in the auteur's canon. I've been waiting for years for at least a DVD of the full five-and-a-half-hour version of August's The Best Intentions (1991), which the Dane directs from a script by Ingmar Bergman. Shout! Factory delivers a rock-solid transfer and good lossless audio. There are no bonus materials. This is the only English-friendly version that I'm aware of. Fans of Emile Hirsch will want to add it their collections but try to get it for around $20 or less. RECOMMENDED.
