The Left Hand of God

In 1947 China, an American pilot named Jim Carmody is shot down and captured by a warlord, Mieh Yang. He escapes, falls in with a priest named O'Shea who is later killed by Yang's men, and takes the dead man's robes as a disguise. Wearing them, Carmody reaches a small Catholic mission where a replacement priest is expected, so he lets the staff and villagers believe he is O'Shea. The mission nurse, Anne Scott, a war widow, grows close to him, while he finds himself drawn into the community's troubles as civil war spreads around them. The story is based on William E. Barrett's novel.

Edward Dmytryk directed the film, the tenth of the eighteen features he made, following Broken Lance and preceding The Mountain, from a screenplay by Alfred Hayes and produced by Buddy Adler. Humphrey Bogart plays Carmody, with Gene Tierney as Anne, Lee J. Cobb as Yang, and Agnes Moorehead, E.G. Marshall and Jean Porter in supporting roles. Made by 20th Century Fox for about two million dollars, it took roughly twice that worldwide, a solid return for its time.

Audience response has been moderate: on IMDb the film holds a 6.4 rating from about 3,100 votes, and on TMDB it sits at 6.3 from a much smaller sample of around 44. Viewers tend to regard it as a mid-range studio production carried by Bogart's presence rather than one of his more memorable pictures.