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The overture gives a drifting view of the South Seas, a tourist lauds their beauty and adventure. "That's what all the travel folders say," the glazed doctor (Thomas Mitchell) instead ponders the devastated sandbar that was once a lush isle. (Tourneur refines the tenor for I Walked with a Zombie.) Paradise is suspended between colonial rigidity and native instinct, the wedding of the strapping seaman (Jon Hall) and the chief's daughter (Dorothy Lamour) moves from chapel procession to outdoors feast, the gown is happily doffed. Injustice, freedom, the perfect storm as the great leveler. A lesson for the monolithic governor (Raymond Massey), "something greater in this world than French criminal code." John Ford has Murnau's Tabu in mind, surely: The imprisoned hero watches the departing schooner from the labor camp and impulsively dives off the cliff, his swimming can't quite catch up so years are added to his sentence. (The montage of escapes and captures centers on an ethereal close-up of Lamour dissolving to a crumbling wall.) Mary Astor as the governor's wife is a vibrant Voice of Reason, John Carradine as a sadistic warden points up the continuation of The Prisoner of Shark Island. Eight years of captivity and six hundred miles of ocean, exhaustion on a canoe and help from the local padre (C. Aubrey Smith), at the end of the line awaits the unknown daughter. Right before the merciless gale, a metaphysical proposition ("You know, I play a kind of chess game with the oldest gambler in the world, Death") not forgotten by Bergman. Handled by Stuart Heisler, "the wind that overturns the world" is a visceral apocalypse that climaxes with the church organ's dying notes and concludes on a sudden act of mercy. Ford pieces the oneiric land back together with Donovan's Reef. With Jerome Cowan, Al Kikume, Kuulei De Clercq, Layne Tom Jr., Mamo Clark, and Inez Courtney. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |