by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I screened for our friend Garry a movie
that’s one of his quirky favorites: The Hurricane, the original 1937 version of this South Seas adventure tale/disaster
movie produced by Sam Goldwyn, directed by John Ford and written by Dudley
Nichols (whose presence on this assignment practically defines “overqualified”)
from an “adaptation” by Oliver H. P. Garrett of a popular potboiler novel by
Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who had written the book
Mutiny on the Bounty from which MGM had made
its popular Academy Award-winning blockbuster with Charles Laughton and Clark
Gable two years earlier. The Hurricane (which was remade by Swedish director Jan Troell in 1979 but without
the definite article in its title that time) is one of those stories that
treads on the thin edge of risibility, and sometimes goes over, but also at
times is genuinely moving. It’s also an odd combination of Hollywood racism and
Hollywood anti-racism; it starts out on an ocean liner in the middle of the
South Seas, where a young woman tourist is looking at a sandbar in the middle
of the Pacific and wondering just how the South Seas islands got their
reputation for awesome beauty when the one she’s actually staring at looks like
nothing in particular. The person she’s standing next to on board the ship, Dr.
Kersaint (Thomas Mitchell, about the only member of the John Ford Stock Company
who made it into this cast — though one other actor in it worked with him on at
least two other, far more illustrious projects; more on that later), explains that what she’s looking at is all
that remains of Manukura (that’s how it’s spelled on the official synopsis for
this film, though when the big romantic theme by Alfred Newman was spun off
into a pop song that was a mega-hit for Bing Crosby, the title was “Moon of
Manakoora”), once the most beautiful South Seas island of all until … At this
point Dr. Kersaint starts narrating a flashback that will take up most of the
movie, about the star-crossed romance between two of the locals, Terangi (Jon
Hall) and Marama (Dorothy Lamour). They’d known each other since they were kids
and fell in love once they hit sexual maturity, and they’ve just been married
by the local missionary, Father Paul (C. Aubrey Smith in a rather
uncharacteristic role for him — one expects to see him as the staunch,
imperious representative of the imperialist order, but instead he’s casually
dressed and supportive of the natives even though he’s also there to convert
them to Christianity), when Terangi’s job as first mate to Captain Nagle
(Jerome Cowan in an unusually long and unusually sympathetic role for him, which is nice — he was a
first-rate and ill-used actor who’s dispatched in the first reel of his most
famous credit, the classic 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon) sends him to Tahiti.
There he gets into a bar fight
with a character listed in the credits only as “Abusive Drunk” (William B.
Davidson); the drunk threw some racist taunts at him and Terangi responded by
punching him out and breaking his jaw. For this he’s sentenced to six months in
prison, a sentence that grows to 16 years because he keeps trying to escape and
keeps getting caught. But the real
villain of the piece is the French governor of Manukura, DeLaage (Raymond
Massey — I hadn’t realized just how extensively Goldwyn and Ford cast this
movie against “type” until I started writing this; a man who had already played
Sherlock Holmes on screen and three years later would play Abraham Lincoln is
here an asshole villain who insists on upholding his sense of “honor” and
“duty” to the French colonial system over simple justice), who insists on
keeping Terangi in prison in Tahiti instead of pardoning him and allowing him
to return home. DeLaage remains unmoved by the entreaties of Dr. Kersaint,
Father Paul, Captain Nagle and even his own wife (Mary Astor — so this film
features two actors who were in
the cast of The Maltese Falcon
four years later). The secondary villain is the sadistic commandant of the
prison in Tahiti where Terangi is being held, who’s played by John Carradine in
a virtual Xerox of his performance the year before as the sadistic commandant
of the prison in Dry Tortugas off the Florida coast in Ford’s The
Prisoner of Shark Island (a much better movie than The Hurricane) the year before, though Carradine’s best-known role
for Ford would come two years after The Hurricane as Preacher Casey in The Grapes of Wrath. As in The Prisoner of Shark Island, Carradine does such a good job of portraying total
evil in his treatment of poor Jon Hall he’s scarier here than in a lot of his
out-and-out horror movies. Terangi eventually escapes eight years after his
incarceration — during that time his wife Marama has born him a daughter, Tita
(Ku’ulei de Clercq), whom he’s heard about but never actually seen — and he
manages not only to survive the 600-mile journey from Tahiti back home to
Manukura on a one-person “warrior canoe,” his provisions limited to the cans he
stole from a store in Tahiti during his flight and whatever fish he can kill on
the way (there’s a scene in which Jon Hall skin-dives into the water going
after a shark, only it turns out he attracts a whole school of sharks, and in
one of the few scenes that challenged John Ford’s creativity as a director he
does some effective suspense editing before Terangi gets back on board the
canoe, unharmed and with the carcass of a shark he can eat to sustain himself
the rest of the way), but miraculously he does so with only a thin moustache on
his upper lip and just the hint of a beard on his chin. (Of course, a male
stranded for days on the open ocean without any way to shave would have grown a
full beard along the way.)
Alas, his return to Manukura happens just as the big
hurricane is starting — the one that will demolish the island of Manukura and
kill most of its inhabitants, native and colonial alike, though the DeLaages
will both survive, as will Dr. Kersaint (well, he has to live in order to narrate the story to the woman
on board the cruise liner at the beginning and end of the film) as well as
Terangi, Marama and their daughter, who escape to another island to which no
one goes because there’s a tabu
on it (the tabu and the sharks
seem to indicate that someone
involved in writing this film and/or the source novel had seen the
Murnau/Flaherty Tabu from 1931 —
and almost certainly Ford and cinematographer Bert Glennon had, because the
visual look of The Hurricane is
very similar to what co-directors F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty and
cinematographer Floyd Crosby, father of rock musician David Crosby, had created
in Tabu). The Hurricane was an elaborate production for 1937 and visually
holds up strikingly well today; Bert Glennon was a protégé of Josef von
Sternberg and his association with Ford included The Prisoner of
Shark Island and appears to be at least
partially responsible for Ford’s curious flirtation with Expressionist
camerawork (which began with The Informer in 1935 and ended with The Long Voyage Home in 1940) before he retreated to a more
straightforward “look” in his films. Glennon shot just about every exterior in The
Hurricane with a red filter, a device
possible only in black-and-white which turns the sky almost black, brings out
differences of shade in the foliage instead of letting it all register as murky
gray, and adds so much not only to the mood of foreboding in the story but to
the overall visual eloquence one wonders why anyone ever thought the movies needed color. (Garry tells me he’s seen a colorized version
of The Hurricane, which I would
assume would be a total disaster; grafting color on Glennon’s spectacular
red-filter effects which were designed for black-and-white would probably
produce something so murky as to be almost completely unwatchable.) The
Hurricane was an unusually well-documented
movie production for the time; when it was new Life magazine published a spread on it that revealed
Goldwyn’s special-effects person, James Basevi, spent $150,000 building an
authentic Polynesian village with a 200-yard-long lagoon and $250,000
destroying it for the final scene (which ranks alongside the destruction of San
Francisco in San Francisco, the
burning of Chicago in In Old Chicago,
the sandstorm in Suez, the
burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, and the earthquake in The Rains Came among a number of quite spectacular disaster sequences
in late-1930’s movies). It also indicated that director Stuart Heisler (who was
credited only as a film editor) took a second unit to Pago Pago in American
Samoa for backgrounds, and some of the Pago Pago scenes involved billed cast
members, even though most of the outdoor scenes in Manukura were shot at
Hollywood’s all-purpose stand-in for the South Pacific, Catalina Island.
More
recent documents, including biographies of Goldwyn and the notes on the film in
the American Film Institute Catalog,
indicate what Goldwyn went through trying to cast the movie, particularly in
finding an actor of the almost ethereal beauty and childlike innocence needed
for the role of Terangi. He considered several actors, including Errol Flynn
(you’ve got to be kidding!), Mala
(the real-life Inuit who’d played his own race in MGM’s 1933 film Eskimo and a Polynesian in Last of the Pagans, also from MGM, in 1935), John Payne and Frank
Shields, before settling on his contract player Joel McCrea. McCrea protested
that he’d look like an Irish cop in the role, and finally Goldwyn settled on a
young actor named Charlie Locher, who supposedly was discovered working parking
cars in a garage but had some previous credits to his name, most notably a
featured role in the 1936 serial The Amazing Adventures of the
Clutching Hand (a remake of 1915’s Pearl
White vehicle The Exploits of Elaine).
Locher’s name got changed to Jon Hall — apparently a moniker he picked for
himself because he’d discovered he was a distant relative of James Norman Hall,
co-author of the novel from which The Hurricane was adapted — and both he and Dorothy Lamour became
big stars, but not for Goldwyn: Hall decamped to Universal while Lamour went
back to her home studio, Paramount, from which Goldwyn had borrowed her and
where she’s best known today as the third point of the romantic triangles
involving Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the famous Road comedies. According to A. Scott Berg’s biography of
Goldwyn, co-writer Charles Nordhoff read Oliver H. P. Garrett’s original script
and decided Garrett had overdone the oppression against Terangi — Nordhoff said
that he and Hall had “made a mistake in not sufficiently emphasizing the fact
that the native hero was not a
victim of injustice, but a victim of circumstance” — though that’s belied not
only by the overall tenor of the story but the specific incidents, including
the open racism on the part of Terangi’s tormentor that leads him to lash out
with his fists and the racial hatred and the French officials’ need to enforce
white privilege that keeps him in prison. The Hurricane is a racist film in that it depicts the Polynesians
as childlike, innocent, unacquainted with Western notions of propriety and
private property (in the opening scene DeLaage comes down hard on a native
who’s “stolen” a canoe, in a culture that probably had a much looser definition
of “ownership” and a greater tolerance of collective possession than his or
ours), but it’s also an anti-racist film in that it’s white Frenchmen who are
the principal villains and the whites who are sympathetic characters are the ones pleading with
officialdom, in the person of DeLaage, to free the technically guilty but
morally innocent Terangi.
The Hurricane was also the second and last film John Ford made for Goldwyn (the first
was an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s novel about medical ethics, Arrowsmith, in 1931 — a story so modern in its conflicts
between honest science and the pharmaceutical industry’s agenda, and between
actual doctors and the health-care industry, it could and should be remade
today), and it’s become legendary how Goldwyn went to the Catalina location to
tell Ford to shoot more luscious cheesecake close-ups of Dorothy Lamour and
Ford responded by clenching his fist and pointing it at various sections of Goldwyn’s
anatomy, each time suggesting he would move his camera (or his fist) even
closer to Goldwyn’s face. Ironically, after that show of defiance against his
producer, Ford complied; in both cheesecake and beefcake The
Hurricane is an unusually sexy movie for
1937, at least partly because the Production Code Administration was looser
towards displays of skin from native people (or actors playing them) in exotic
locations like the South Seas than players representing ordinary urban or rural
Americans. The Hurricane is a
fascinating film because some of it is almost risible, while some of it is both
visually and dramatically powerful; according to Goldwyn biographer A. Scott
Berg, it was Ford’s idea to bring Dudley Nichols onto the project, and Nichols’
main contribution was not writing
additional dialogue, but quite the opposite: cutting much of the verbiage in
Garrett’s script so the movie played more like a silent film, with visuals
rather than words telling its story — to great effect. The Hurricane is an oddball movie, both in its combination of
romantic melodrama and disaster film (though at least it’s one of the rare
disaster films that contains enough sympathetic characters we actually root for
them and want to see them survive — some of the 1970’s disaster movies, most
notably The Poseidon Adventure,
had such repulsive characters we couldn’t want to see them start dying!) and
its vivid contrast between silly dialogue and eloquent visuals — but it
certainly holds up as worth seeing if not as one of the all-time classics of
the era.
