The Pagan (MGM, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 5) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” offering of a film on the cusp of the silent-sound transition: The Pagan, made in 1929 by MGM as a vehicle for their big silent star, Ramon Novarro. It was a follow-up to their highly successful film from one year before, White Shadows in the South Seas, which had begun as a project for the legendary documentarian Robert Flaherty. White Shadows was the first of Van Dyke’s “expeditionary films,” not only taking place in exotic locales but actually shot there, that later included Trader Horn (1931), Cuban Love Song (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), and Eskimo (1933). Van Dyke, whose full name was Woodbridge (not Woodrow, as a lot of people assumed) Strong Van Dyke, made The Pagan as the immediate follow-up to White Shadows and got assigned Novarro, who had become a star mainly because director Rex Ingram had drafted him as Rudolph Valentino’s replacement after Valentino left Metro and went to Paramount following the successes of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Conquering Power (both 1921). Ingram cast Novarro in The Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche (both 1922), and they did well enough that though Ingram departed Hollywood after the merger that formed MGM (he set up his own production company and made his films in Europe at the Vittorine Studio in Nice, France), Novarro became a big enough star that he was tapped to play the lead in the 1926 silent version of Ben-Hur. (I still think that’s a better film than the 1959 remake, and one of the reasons it’s better is that Novarro’s rather nellie persona actually works better for the character than Charlton Heston’s outright machismo in the remake.)

By the time Van Dyke and crew returned home from having shot The Pagan in Tahiti (the opening credits announce that the film was “Produced and photographed in the Paumotu Islands of the South Seas,” but the “Paumoto Islands” don’t actually exist and the film’s imdb.com page suggests it was a pseudonym for the Tuamotos, which were part of French Polynesia and whose most prominent island was Tahiti, where the film was actually made), sound had come to motion pictures and a silent movie was unreleasable without some sort of soundtrack. So MGM’s executives went to work, commissioning Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed to write a theme song for the film, “Pagan Love Song,” and have Novarro and co-star Dorothy Janis sing it on screen – sort of. It’s obvious that Van Dyke and crew merely pre-recorded the song and dubbed it onto the soundtrack more or less in synch with silent footage of Novarro singing, or doing something resembling singing. There are a couple of brief scenes in which Novarro’s lip movements come close enough to matching his voice to be credible, but for the most part it’s all too obvious that they tried as best they could to match footage of Novarro moving his lips in vague synchronization to his recorded voice. (One wonders why they didn’t send a crew out to Catalina Island, Hollywood’s all-purpose double for the South Seas, and shoot Novarro’s big musical number properly. But then they wouldn’t have been able to advertise the film as photographed entirely in the South Seas.) The Pagan had a weird set of trifurcated writing credits: John Russell got credit for the story, Dorothy Farnum for the scenario (which usually in the silent era meant a list of scenes that briefly described what would be occurring when and in what order), and John Howard Lawson for the titles. Lawson’s Left-wing politics were readily apparent in some of them, especially one in which the boom town that’s risen on the previously pristine island is described as “six barrooms and a bank.”

Plot-wise, The Pagan is a mixture of the beautiful and the silly: the two leads, Henry Shoesmith, Jr. (Ramon Novarro) and Tito (Dorothy Janis), are both mixed-race products of liaisons between white fathers and Polynesian mothers. Only they grew up quite differently: Henry was raised by his Polynesian mother basically to lay around all day and loaf, while Tito ended up in the custody of the film’s villain, Roger Slater (Donald Crisp). Slater was determined to raise her to be a white woman, forcing her to attend the local Christian church (where there’s a marvelous sequence of the mostly Polynesian congregation singing the hymn “Jesus Loves Me” in Tahitian), dress in white people’s clothes, study white people’s concept of sin, and get horrifically punished whenever she slips and starts acting like a Polynesian. Slater is also determined to grab the coconut plantation Henry inherited from his white father and profiteer off it. He approaches Henry for the right to work the plantation and harvest the coconuts for copra (which is what coconut meat becomes when it dries; it’s useful for extracting soap and oil) “at a fair price,” and just when we’re bracing ourselves for the evil Slater to offer Henry a low-ball deal, Henry gives him the rights to his coconut crop for nothing at all, saying, “If I try to eat too many, I get sick.” Henry’s appalling naïveté about financial matters is the most annoying thing about this movie; later, after being lectured by Slater that he needs to restock the store his dad left him by borrowing money, expanding his inventory, and ultimately making money, Henry borrows the money and sells the goods, all right, but he makes all his sales on credit and doesn’t even try to collect. Instead he just writes how much he’s theoretically owed in a ledger book and then borrows more money – until Slater, who to no one’s surprise turns out to be the owner of Henry’s debt, calls in his loans and forecloses on him, taking the store.

Along the way we’re introduced to a fourth character, an island prostitute named Madge, played by an actress with the grandly phony screen name “Renée Adorée.” (I’d always assumed that name was a Hollywood concoction, but it was actually her own idea; she was born Jeanne de la Fonte, but she decided to name herself after the French words for “reborn” and “adored.”) We know Madge is a prostitute because Slater throws her off his ship and grandly thunders, “We don’t want your kind of woman around here.” Madge hooks up platonically with Henry – who has eyes only for Tito – and where I thought this was going was that Madge would become Henry’s partner in the store and teach him viable business practices. Instead Madge just hangs around the fringes of the action. Henry and Tito have an innocent flirtation that consists mostly of them chasing each other around the gorgeous Polynesian scenery and throwing water at each other. But that’s all too nasty for Slater, whom we realize after a brief scene of him stroking Tito’s hair is interested in her not only socially but sexually. Slater forces Tito to marry him at the local church, and Henry responds by grabbing her and trying to swim to shore with her. Just then we see shark fins in the water and we think, “Oh, sharks ex machina.” Slater tries to chase them down in his boat, Henry and Tito try to get on it, Slater pushes them away … and just then, as Slater is flailing at Henry with a convenient cutlass he brought with him from the ship, Slater loses his balance and falls into the sea, where he becomes shark food and is conveniently eliminated so Henry and Tito can escape and settle down together in Henry’s mother’s old house in Tahiti’s native quarter.

If nothing else, The Pagan shows off the influence of Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) on just about every movie Hollywood made about Polynesia after that; not only is the visual quality similar – with heavy use of red filters and panchromatic film stock – there’s even a cop of Flaherty’s famous panning shot of a young boy climbing a coconut tree with a knife to cut the coconuts down. (Just about every movie made for the next several decades about a part of the world that grows coconuts contained that shot.) At times the movie looks wondrous – especially in the scenes in which Henry and Tito are having innocent fun together – and at times the scenes between Slater and the half-native characters get oppressive and dark. We’re already shown from a brief shot of Slater stroking Tito’s hair that his interest in her is more than to give her moral instruction and train her to live as a white woman. He’s also interested in her body – no surprise there! Both Charles and I were reminded of the famous play Rain, based on W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Miss Thompson,” about a minister who tries to “reform” a woman of proverbially loose morals and ends up lustfully falling for her himself. In fact, in The Pagan Slater forces Tito to go through a marriage ceremony, and Henry actually arrives too late to stop the wedding (anticipating The Graduate by 38 years!), though in the end that doesn’t matter because the sharks ex machina devour Slater before he can rape Tito and consummate the marriage. It’s also ironic that in 1934 the same director, W. S. Van Dyke, and the same star, Ramon Novarro, teamed up again for Laughing Boy, which is essentially the same plot as The Pagan only in this one Novarro’s character is a Native American, a Navajo, who falls in love with a Navajo girl (played by actress Lupe Velez, who like Novarro was Mexican by birth) who’d been raised by whites and taught to reject her own culture.