Headquarters in Kunming orders him to use his pre-war engineering expertise to delay the advancing Japanese forces as much as possible while retreating by road, but General Loomis gives him the option to return to base with him by air.

Baldwin has at his command Sergeant Michaelson, Prince, Lewis, Miller, Collins (the demolition team's translator), and two other soldiers, a Jeep and four trucks.

On the road, Baldwin finds out from Chinese commander Colonel Li that the Japanese wish to capture a munitions dump 120 miles (190 km) away.

Li assigns Colonel Kwan to the team, but before they can embark, Madame Sue-Mei Hung, the American-educated widow of a general, joins them, with Baldwin gradually becoming attracted to her.

Although the Japanese invaders were the feared antagonists, they never appear, as The Mountain Road diverges from typical World War II action films by dealing with a more sensitive subplot, delving into the cultural misunderstanding and racial prejudice between American soldiers and their Chinese allies.

White's original story contained a serious message that stemmed from his extended sojourn in China, first as a freelance reporter in 1938, and shortly thereafter as correspondent for Time magazine.

When he left his post and returned to the United States in 1946, White and colleague Anna Lee Jacoby wrote a best-selling nonfiction book Thunder Out of China, describing the country in wartime.

Lisa Lu, who played Madame Sue-Mei Hung in her first major role,[8] recruited P. C. Lee, Leo Chen, Richard Wang and C. N. Hu, faculty members from the Chinese Mandarin Department, Army Language School, to appear in the film.

The New York Times reviewer Howard Thompson noted, "Even with its final, philosophical overtones, this remains a curiously taciturn, dogged and matter-of-fact little picture—none too stimulating… bluntly, and none too imaginatively.

In his memoirs, he describes seeing it at a theater in Times Square, where a group of teenagers sitting behind him cheered the explosions and the Americans' revenging the deaths of their comrades with the destruction of the village.

But by the time when he wrote his memoirs, he had come to feel that the "reality of the twenty-five-year-long American record in Asia was that of genuine good will exercised in mass killing, a grisly irony which White could master neither in film nor book.