A few characters are cynical “rice Christians,” accepting the faith for what they can get out of it. No less interesting is the Chinese response to the missions. The perpetrator is a distinguished Catholic cleric, a later bishop, who is clearly the moral and intellectual inferior of the faithful Chinese. Any remarks about the Chinese being dirty, work-shy, barbarous, and so on, come from a white character already identified as an arrogant idiot. Many parts of the film are spoken in Chinese, without the familiar resort to characters speaking in pidgin.

(Think of The Good Earth, released just a few years previously).

In virtually all cases, the Chinese characters in Keys of the Kingdom are played by Asian actors, so we do not have to deal with Hollywood’s grotesque tendency to cast whites in those roles. If this does not strike you as astonishing, you have not watched enough US cinema from that era. This, however, was the Second World War, when China was a cherished US ally, and in consequence, the film consistently depicts the Chinese as – as, well, real people, running the full gamut of human types, from saints to thugs, with all points inbetween. Particularly striking is the film’s treatment of Chinese characters in an age when Hollywood consistently offered agonizingly dreadful stereotypes of virtually all non-White racial groups. Although he does not convert the city, he becomes something like its patron saint. A medical mission evolves into a flourishing school and orphanage, and in the process, Chisholm helps defend the city from the armies of rampaging warlords. Though his superiors commonly regard him as a pathetic failure, we see what a tremendous success he has been in developing a thriving Christian settlement in a Chinese city. The Keys of the Kingdom tells the story of Francis Chisholm (Gregory Peck), a Scottish Catholic priest who served many years in the China missions in the first third of the twentieth century. It thus makes for a fine teaching resource. It does a lovely job of portraying the American vision of missions at its most exalted and optimistic, but in a way that pays full respect to the people on the receiving end of missionary efforts. In more recent years, though, as I studied global Christianity, it occurred to me what a treasure the film is, and how often it runs against contemporary stereotypes.

For many years, I have dearly loved the 1944 film The Keys of the Kingdom, based on the 1941 novel by A.

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