High Road to China (1983)

Eve Tozer (Bess Armstrong) is a daughter of a wealthy industrialist.  She is a spendthrift party girl, a flapper with bobbed hair and scandalously short skirt.  Then disaster strikes.  Word is that her long absent father is going to be declared legally dead and the company - the source of her money - will belong to the surviving partner, Mr. Bentik (Robert Morley).  She has 12 days to get her father to a British Court to avert poverty!  Worse still, Bentik has sent men to prevent her from trying.  Last she heard, her father was in Waziristan; she'll need a plane.

Patrick O'Malley (Tom Selleck) is an American flying ace who owns a couple of planes.  Exactly how he has the planes in Istanbul while also being penniless is not explored.  Nonetheless, he refuses Eve's multiple generous offers to hire him.  He finally relents when she offers 100,000 pounds.  They depart for the east under gunfire from Bentik's goons though O'Malley thinks its a jealous husband seeking revenge; apparently he's a womanizer?  All evidence is to the contrary for the remainder of the film.

Selleck and Armstrong mostly yell at each other.  Sure, we all know they will love one another by the end but it is rather sudden.  The chemistry was weak.  Of course, the characters were not well written.  Why did Eve decide that she should take the plane and do a bombing run of the Chinese soldiers?  To save her father, who had things well under control?  O'Malley is introduced as a drunken womanizer but, little more than a week later, he is sober and falling for Eve.

When they track down her father (Wilford Brimley) on the far side of the Himalayas, he explains that Eve's wealth is in no danger.  All the patents are in his name.  Gee, if only that fancy London lawyer had known that, this whole trip could have been avoided.  On another subject, why is this portly industrialist building bombs for Chinese peasants?  It would have been nice to get an adequate backstory for Bradley Tozer's wanderings.

Though weak in retrospect, it was enjoyable to watch.  May have to get the book to find out what really happened.