Blood Alley is a 1955 American seafaring Cold War adventure film produced by John Wayne, directed by William A. Wellman, and starring Wayne and Lauren Bacall. The film was distributed by Warner Bros. and shot in CinemaScope and Warnercolor. The film depicts a voyage from Shanghai to Hong Kong via the Formosa Strait. Plot Captain Tom Wilder, an American Merchant Mariner, is taken prisoner after his ship is seized by the Chinese Communists. After two years in prison, he is helped to escape with both bribery and by disguising him as a Soviet army officer. A large Chinese man transports Wilder to Chiku Shan village without divulging why he was broken out of prison. The village leader, Mr. Tso, tells Wilder he has been recruited to transport nearly 200 Chiku Shan residents out of Red China to freedom in the British port of Hong Kong. For the task, Captain Wilder must pilot a stolen, wood-burning, flat-bottomed, 19th Century stern-wheel riverboat. He will need to utilize his detailed memory of the China coast to draw a chart and navigate using an unreliable magnetic compass, and without a chronometer. Finally, he must rely upon the villagers' determination and resources to escape. The villagers have been planning their escape for more than a year, gradually raising the harbor channel's bottom with stones in order to trap the local Red Chinese patrol boat once it has been lured inside. Sinking sampans loaded with rocks at the channel mouth will cause the patrol boat to run aground while the village escapes. The villagers have also been secretly accumulating arms, ranging from Browning machine guns to Mosin–Nagant rifles and Nagant revolvers. Their plan is complicated by having to bring along the large Communist Feng family so they will not be blamed for allowing the mass escape. The villagers include the riverboat's Chief Engineer, a U.S. Navy-trained marine engineer named Tack, who helps steal the steamboat. Tack and Wilder bring the stern wheeler to Chiku Shan village where it is loaded with furnace firewood, boiler water, and all their provisions; it is re-christened with the village's name. Wilder meets and is attracted to a tough and determined American woman named Cathy Grainger, whose father is a medical missionary in the village. Dr. Grainger was recently executed by the Red Chinese following unsuccessful surgery on a political commissar. To prevent her staying behind, Wilder tells Cathy about her