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A little joke early on sets up the unabashed eroticism ahead: "Probably one of the Virgin Islands." "Oh, heaven forbid!" Hallelujah assuredly influenced Murnau's Tabu, King Vidor returns the compliment with camera movement free and fateful. Pleasure-seekers in their South Seas idyll, lust at first sight for the strapping Yank (Joel McCrea) and the chief's daughter (Dolores del Río). The wedding interrupted, off to their own isle. "Aw, taboo bunk!" Tactile impressions abound, sun and moonlight, glistening flesh and overflowing coconut milk. The lark darkens, inescapable tradition includes the smoldering volcano that demands sacrificial maidens. The proximity to Tarzan the Ape Man (and Tarzan and His Mate) has been observed, the feller in the Tiki hut goes on about airplanes and radios until his ode to civilization puts the heroine to sleep. Silent-film splendors (cf. Flaherty's Moana), aided by encircling foliage like swaying irises and a continuous Max Steiner score. The shark that emerges among welcoming canoes, the spear that interrupts the couple's furtive kiss, the paradisiacal ground that cracks and burns under the hero's feet. "Happy, carefree people, uh?" Pure Vidor in its elemental forces, with a river of lava to be dutifully crossed by the intrepid protagonist. (A decade later it becomes the molten steel of An American Romance.) Busby Berkeley routines for the tribe's writhing dances, sets ready for King Kong the following year. A slangy rejoinder to Kipling's East-West divide: "Yeah, Mac, what's the dope on the North and the South?" Rossellini evinces a vivid memory of it in Stromboli. With John Halliday, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Lon Chaney Jr., Bert Roach, Wade Boteler, Arnold Gray, and Reginald Simpson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |