High Road to China (1983)

High Road to China (1983), directed by Brian G. Hutton.

In the 1920s, spoiled but plucky rich girl Bess Armstrong hires drunken WW1 ace Tom Selleck to help find her missing father, a hunt that takes them across India, Afghanistan, Nepal and China.

This is in the post-Indiana Jones retro-adventure genre. Nate and Hayes (1983) with Tommy Lee Jones was another.

The good:

The bad:

The ugly:

I saw this in the theater and it has been on my want-list for years, but was unavailable until recently. My wife had never seen it. Her judgment: "Sometimes these things work and sometimes they don't." But later: "We're keeping this one, aren't we?" I think it's the Selleck Effect.

Available on bare-bones Blu-ray. It's about DVD quality, maybe a touch better in spots. It has some black, but the blacks are often crushed. Some dark scenes are very noisy, but that may have been the film.

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