White Savage (Universal, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I screened for my husband Charles and I on Friday, January 13 was White Savage, second in the cycle of six movies Universal made in 1942-1945 co-starring Dominican actress Maria Montez and Jon Hall, U.S.-born actor whose mother was a Tahitian princess – which is ironic because in this movie he’s cast as an Australian fisherman in love with a South Seas princess played by Montez. A couple of decades ago I was able to record most of the Montez-Hall movies from American Movie Classics (back when that benighted channel still lived up to its name before it became “Debbie-ized” – the term comes from a Los Angeles Times article from several years ago about a woman named Debbie who had taken over programming at various cable channels and eliminated their unique identities, instead imposing the same regimen of crappy “original” programming on them; what really ticked me off about this article was the writer was portraying Debbie as a heroine!), but this one had eluded me. I’d long hoped for a boxed-set reissue of all six Montez-Hall films – Arabian Nights, White Savage, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Cobra Woman, Gypsy Wildcat and Sudan – and I grabbed this box even though it contained only three of them (White Savage, Gypsy Wildcat and Sudan) and I’ll keep hoping either Universal or Kino Lorber, who put out this one, will release another disc containing the other three.

>White Savage was based on an “original” (quotes definitely merited) story by Peter Milne,turned into a screenplay by future director Richard Brooks, who would later go on to much bigger and more prestigious movies than this (like Something of Value, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood, The Happy Ending and Looking for Mr. Goodbar). It was produced by George Waggner, best known as both producer and director of the 1941 The Wolf Man,and directed by Arthur Lubin right as he was coming off the sensational success of the first five Abbott and Costello starring vehicles for Universal. (It’s somewhat surprising that he never worked with them again after those successes, but maybe he got tired of dealing with them; there were times during Abbott and Costello’s movie career when they refused to speak to each other on or off screen, and their writers accommodated them by giving them as few scenes together as possible.) Its plot is the familiar farrago of nonsense given a Polynesian twist (though the location work was almost certainly done on Catalina Island, Hollywood’s all-purpose substitute for the South Seas). Shark fisherman Kaloe (Jon Hall) is living on the fictitious Polynesian island of Port Coral; he’s convinced that he can make a fortune if he can win permission from Princess Tahia (Maria Montez) to fish in the channel between two islands, but the princess has so far refused to grant him the rights.

There’s also nasty white people on the island, including German-born trader Sam Miller (played by New York-born Latino-American Thomas Gomez, true name Sabino Tomás Gomez, a far cry from his best-known role as the proto-Columbo homicide cop in Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady) and his henchmen Erik (Paul Guilfoyle) and Chris (Don Terry). Also in the cast of characters in this weirdly assorted mishmash of ethnicities is Missouri-born Sidney Toler in full Charlie Chan drag as Wong, combination detective, attorney, notary public, banker and what-have-you on the island; Blossom (Constance Purdy), a jumbo-sized woman who’s Tahia’s second-in-command; Orano (Sabu), Kaloe’s sidekick (there’s a brief line of dialogue that he’s Blossom’s son but ot much is made of that); and Tamara (Turhan Bey), Tahia’s no-account gambling-addict brother who’s about to lose the title to Tahia’s island at Miller’s gambling table, Miller cheats at cards by stuffing a hand with five aces in a cheese sandwich he orders from his own kitchen, but at the last minute Kaloe figures it out and wins back the deed by cutting the sandwich with his fishing knife. (I had actually hoped that Milne and Brooks would have had him cheat himself to win the game, à la Minnie in The Girl of the Golden West.) Miller’s next attempt to grab title to Tahia’s island and thereby get the huge fortune in gold that lines Tahia’s swimming pool (I’m not making this up, you know!) involves him paying Christ to kill Tamara with Kaloe’s knife, framing him for the crime.

This leads Tahia, who so far has been in love with him (despite a nastier meet-cute between them in which he literally hooked her with his fishing tackle), but as the island’s ruler Tahia finds Kaloe guilty and sentences him to an ordeal in a pit with five leopards, panthers or some other species of big, predatory cats. Kaloe escapes with the help of Orano (whose name sounds like a drain cleaner), who literally throws him a lifeline in the shape of a rope which allows Kaloe to tightrope-walk out of the enclosure just as the cats have figured out how to climb the post separating them from Kaloe – and there’s a moment that tries for heart-stopping suspense when Kaloe briefly slips on the rope but fortunately recovers inb time to avoid becoming cat food. There’s a big production number that’s supposed to represent an island ritual in which women are able to select the men they want to marry – there’s no singing but plenty of dancing – and though the religious rituals of the islanders are hardly depicted with the same sophistication Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur brought to Caribbean voodoo rituals in I Walked with a Zombie. Charles was impressed with the relative sympathy with which the islanders were portrayed. “At least they’re not shown as savages with bones through their noses,” he said, and when he asked me when the film was made and I said 1943, he figured that was because the U.S. wanted the indigenous people of the South Seas to be on our side during World War II.

In the end, with all his plans to steal the hidden treasure at the bottom of Tahia’s pool having been foiled by Kaloe, Miller and the remaining members of his gang (including Erik, but not Chris since he’s been killed in a previous scene), plant dynamite on the island and blow it up – there are some great miniature effects by John P. Fulton here – and in the end an earthquake ex machina disposes of all the bad guys and Kaloe and Tahia embrace among the ruins. Like all the Montez-Hall vehicles, White Savage is a camp-fest; Montez could look credible as a Polynesian, an Arab, aGypsy or whatever else the script told us she was playing, but the moment she opened her mouth her real-life Latina origins came out, especially in the marvelous scene in Cobra Woman in which as an evil queen (Montez actually played a double role, one good and one bad) she punctuates her latest proclamation of doom with, “I have espoken!” It’s also a paean to the joys of three-swtrip Technicolor at its most vivid, intense and garish; as Charles said just a min9ute or two in, “That’s so Natalie!” (“Natalie” meant Natalie Kalmus, estranged wife of Technicolor inventor Herbert Kalmus, who served as “color consultant” on innumerable Technicolor films and insisted that the colors be as bright and vivid as possible.) White Savage is an utterly mindless movie but also a quite entertaining one if you don’t mind the utter predictability of its plot conventions.