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The slingshot and the parasol, Shaw by way of Maugham. Charles Laughton as the beached walrus awakens on his cabana's floor, dabs his whiskers with shoe polish, and strikes into town with straw hat cocked. Elsa Lanchester is given the corseted indignation of Christian soldiers and the proper pronunciation of "Nuts in May," they first cross paths at the saloon where the shaggy reprobate is busy wooing one of her students. "Madam, would you kindly remove your little kettle to another stove?" The local magistrate (Robert Newton) envies the beachcomber's reckless freedom and eases his deportation by sending him to a Gauguinesque idyll, which nevertheless has too much milk for his taste. Libertine and scold inevitably find themselves stuck on an island, soon enough they're braving the elements together, already mimicking marital bickering in the middle of a typhoid epidemic. "What can I do for this poor soul?" "Well, from what I hear, all he really needs is a bath." Clashing faiths (sensualist versus evangelical) in the Dutch East Indies, with a paternalistic eye for natives and a homesick view of English tea. Having worked as a producer for Murnau, Lang and Dupont, Erich Rommer modulates his direction with frequent tracking shots and pure Germanic lighting on a sweltering jungle set. (Ford's Arrowsmith, Hitchcock's Rich and Strange and Milestone's Rain are among his models.) "Everybody is flotsam and jetsam," shrugs the Law, harmony at last is a busy pub back home. The material would be later reworked in The African Queen (and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison and Father Goose), but scarcely with the knowing nuttiness of Laughton and Lanchester. With Tyrone Guthrie, Eliot Makeham, and Dolly Mollinger. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |