[2] The film depicts a voyage from Chiku Shan, a village on the Communist Chinese coast, all the way to Hong Kong via the Formosa Strait.

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.

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.

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.

Wilder meets and is attracted to a tough and determined American woman named Cathy Grainger, whose father is a medical missionary in the village.

To prevent her staying behind, Wilder tells Cathy about her father's death just before the villagers leave Chiku Shan, though she refuses to believe him.

The Fengs are put ashore, only to be taken back aboard when the pursuing Red Chinese destroyer begins shelling the Graveyard from a distance.

Because smoke would reveal their position, the villagers both pole and tow the riverboat through miles of marshlands until reaching the open sea beyond the destroyer's search area.

[4] Blood Alley is a nickname for Rue Chu Pao-san, a short street off Avenue Edward VII, located in Shanghai,[7] where Fleischman had visited as a sailor on the USS Albert T. Harris (DE-447).

"Later, my dad (John Wayne) discovered that William Wellman drove Robert Mitchum to quit (though not necessarily to drink).

"[9]Wayne plays a Merchant Marine captain in a role originally intended for Robert Mitchum prior to an altercation with the producers.

[10][11] Wayne took over the lead after Gregory Peck turned the film down and Humphrey Bogart requested a large amount of money to assume the role.

In an unusual two-episode arc airing as the show's season opener on October 10, 1955, Lucy and Ethel steal Wayne's footprints from the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre the night before the premiere of Blood Alley, and complications ensue.

[16] The New York Times said, "Blood Alley, despite its exotic, oriental setting, is a standard chase melodrama patterned on a familiar blueprint.