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The onset suggests a Shanghai Express send-up, a quartet of Americans out of the pestilent cruise ship and into the sweltering Malaysian island. "You haven't traveled the Far East much, have you?" The journalistic blowhard (William Gargan) sees the situation as a smashing article in the making, the rubber chemist (Herbert Marshall) is a henpecked sourpuss, neither has much time for the schoolmarm (Claudette Colbert) until her specs shatter and her dress frays. The socialite (Mary Boland) carries furs and lapdog into the jungle, her cause du jour is contraception, she ends up playing Lysistrata at a native village. Their guide (Leo Carrillo) struts smilingly in front of burning huts with striped tie on bare chest, "the most white man of this place." Cecil B. DeMille back in Male and Female mode, absolutely dying to give civilization a leopard-skin sarong. Charging buffalo, hissing cobras, snapping Venus flytraps, leering chimps and bombarding cocoanuts fill the environment, no reason not to slow down the expedition and pluck an orchid off a trunk. "It's quite picnicky, isn't it? Depending on how one looks at it." The mousy heroine blooms provocatively and takes charge, she has the pick of the lusty dolts around her and is ready to take up bow and arrow to keep it. A tangle of mighty tree roots, a bamboo maze palpitating to distant drums, Karl Struss light on Hawaiian locations. Robinson Crusoe is duly taken stock of, "stupid book." Restored order can hardly be endured, the fusty classroom learns about the primate within. "For heaven's sake, stop turning everything into a sex problem!" The easygoing bizarrerie is best appreciated by Buñuel in Death in the Garden. With Nella Walker, Ethel Griffies, Tetsu Komai, and Chris-Pin Martin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |