A Countess From Hong Kong-The story is based loosely on the life of a woman Chaplin met in France, named Moussia Sodskaya, or “Skaya”] as he calls her in his 1922 book My Trip Abroad. She was a Russian singer and dancer who “was a stateless person marooned in France without a passport”. The idea, according to a press release written by Chaplin after the film received a negative reception, “resulted from a visit I made to Shanghai in 1931 where I came across a number of titled aristocrats who had escaped the Russian Revolution. They were destitute and without a country; their status was of the lowest grade. The men ran rickshaws and the women worked in ten-cent dance halls. When the Second World War broke out many of the old aristocrats had died and the younger generation migrated to Hong Kong where their plight was even worse, for Hong Kong was overcrowded with refugees.
The Pride and the passion -The film’s storyline concerns a British Royal Navy artillery officer (Grant) who has orders to retrieve a huge siege cannon from Spain and transport it by ship to British forces. But first, the leader of the Spanish guerrillas (Sinatra) wants to transport the weapon 1,000 km (620 mi) across Spain, to help in the recapture of the city of Ávila from the occupying French before he releases it to the British. Most of the film deals with the hardships of transporting the big gun to Ávila across rivers and through mountains, while also evading the occupying French forces that have been ordered to find it. A subplot concerns the struggle for the love of the Spanish woman Juana (Loren) by the two male protagonists.
