"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat."

Rudyard Kipling

"The Children of Huang Shi," a true story based on the writings of Jane Hawksley and James MacManus, has everything you've missed in the last 20 years of movies. It has pathos, drama, orphans, love scenes, war scenes, great cinematography, good direction and last but not least, a story.

Not that this is great cinema. It's 30 minutes too long, and I'm not crazy about Jonathan Rhys-Meyers who plays the lead. He's a good, strong young actor, but relies too much on his fluttering eyelashes to communicate various passions.

But Radha Mitchell (Woody Allen's "Melinda and Melinda") is good and Chow Yun-Fat, the Asian Cary Grant, not looking very Cary Grant here in a James Shigeta part, does a serviceable job, considering director Roger Spottiswoode doesn't give him one strong scene. Chow deserves more.

Rhys-Meyers plays British journalist George Hogg, the hero of this true story. Hogg was sent to China to cover the Japanese invasion in 1936 and, hungry to get to the front and shoot some action, gets caught with photos of atrocities and almost gets his head sliced off by a mean Japanese officer. But fate, in the form of Chen Hansheng (Chow Yun-Fat), a Communist officer and his crew (this is 1936, we liked them then and they were nicer), shoots Hogg's captors and brings him to hide out in the orphanage. Here, Hogg plays out his now famous life. He becomes a pacifist and Yankee godfather to the orphans.

Radha Mitchell, a strange, floaty actress who always appears to be thinking about something else, shows up in riding jodhpurs and blue eyes, as an American nurse who abandoned her old life as a bored army wife and came to China to find her soul.

Instead she found Chen, who speaks perfect English because he graduated from West Point. (I'd love to read the book this is based on, because I suspect Chen had a better part.) In our movie, they have long fallen apart, which leaves a hot door open for Hogg.

Everyone else is Chinese and is subtitled, thank God, so I won't list all their names. But I will tell you that this is the best group of young Asian actors I've seen in years.

The cast is enhanced by the glowing presence of Michelle Yeoh, who plays Mrs. Wang, the owner of a curiosity shop, garment and food store and, we discover, an opium den in the back room. One of our friends, we will discover, has a yearning for dream smoke.

Yeoh knows some secrets and will, near the end, make a deal that will save some lives. Yeoh, you will remember, brightened our screens in "Memoirs Of a Geisha" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

"Children" starts with a bang, lots of them, as the Japanese come to town, and it never slows down. Hogg, as history tells us, refused to leave and save his life and takes 60 children on a three-month march to the North.

Director Spottiswoode then gives us a big, dusty, dangerous canvas fraught with enemy soldiers, bombings and a perilous flight 10,000 feet into the Chinese mountains, and down into the Gobi Desert to refuge in an abandoned monastery.

"Children," on some levels, if you're an old movie buff, is a rather interesting combination of "Journey For Margaret," "Lost Horizon" and "Mr. Chips." Remember, we're talking about heartbreaking orphans and the transformation of a thrill-greedy journalist into one of God's pilgrims, a healer and mentor who gives up the West to help save the East.

Rudyard Kipling knew how that would go, but pilgrims, by their very nature, never listen.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.