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He is an embezzling clerk and a dissolute expat, British imperialism's shame and id, Trevor Howard with fantastic shades of obsession and desperation. On the run in Singapore, he's scooped up by the paternalistic captain (Ralph Richardson) for a new start at the Indonesian outpost run by his daughter (Wendy Hiller) and her husband (Robert Morley). Trading tensions with the locals, wryly voiced by the tribal spokesman (George Coulouris): "Does the white man know what is best for us?" Nothing interests the outsider except the blind chief's daughter (Kerima), a sullen beauty, silent, humid and "quite merciless." Desire, treachery, ruination. "You have been possessed of a devil." "Yes, isn't it pretty?" Conrad in the colonial tropics, a beady eye shared with Carol Reed in intricate arrangements of nets and fronds and wicker. A perilous passage skillfully navigated is a thing of value, partnership with the Arab trader (Peter Illing) gives way to the storming of "the civilized house," Morley wrapped in a hammock and swung from the trees while his daughter playfully screams "Pig! Pig! Pig!" (Before that, a signature moment sees him exploding with stuffy indignation after Howard lights his stogie on a birthday cake's candles.) "He has cursed you." "Well, that's, that's not very helpful, is it?" A mobile camera on Sri Lankan locations, exceptional training grounds for future cinematographers (Freddie Francis, Ted Moore, Gerry Fisher). The concealed siren and the gremlin guide, an ambush to bring in noir shadows and maybe a grain of Murnau's Tabu. Foul life, "foul like a tangled rigging on a dirty night," a magisterial utterance by Richardson. It ends on rocks under unpurifying rain, the exile is complete. Bogdanovich (Saint Jack) and Hellman (Iguana) contribute contrasting analyses. With Wilfrid Hyde-White, Betty Ann Davies, Annabel Morley, Frederick Valk, and A.V. Bramble. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |