Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)

After catching fish, young men wash off in a waterfall, as one does. Realizing that young ladies are bathing upstream, they sneak up and kidnap them. I may be misunderstanding this part of Polynesian courtship. Anyhow, a white man’s boat arrives carrying an elder from another tribe. He reads a scroll written in French. It’s unclear what it says but judging by the tonal shift in the film’s score, it does not bode well for our young kidnap victim.

Tabu is essentially a silent film with a synchronized score. There is no dialog and the only thing resembling a title card is when written words are shown on camera. I was about a third through the film that I realized turning on closed captions would translate them. The Amazon version seemed to be missing about nine minutes. A copy on youtube appears to be complete and shows translated text without resorting to closed captions. Amazon Prime fails me again.

Here "Tabu" means forbidden, but with a tribal enforcement aspect. Because pretty young Reri is promised to a powerful chief, it is Tabu for another man to express interest in her. Also, don’t dive for pearls where sharks are known to swim. Safety tip. It’s also taboo to build a house on ancient burial grounds as Directory F.W. Murnau did. This, along with his manner and how the natives were depicted, caused significant friction with the local population. He would die before the film’s release. And so it goes.

A great number of films were made exploiting the young, pretty, and topless ladies of the south seas. While I don’t think that was the intention of this film, it might be their spiritual granddaddy. That said, there isn’t a whole lot of story here. Boy kidnaps girl, girl is promised to powerful chieftain, they run away together, then face the consequences. The classic tale. More so than nudity, the film exploits their exotic otherness. See the native peoples and their strange ways. Nanook director Robert J. Flaherty, no stranger to exotic otherness, was supposed to be co-director. He quit after butting heads with Murnau.

Filmed almost thirty years prior to Hawaii’s statehood, audiences ate it up, even though the fairly sparse nudity had been edited out. Today the novelty of seeing Pacific Islanders is not a thing, so Tabu offers little for modern audiences. And, truth be told, while it is interesting, it's not that interesting. AMRU 3.

Terror by Night (1946)

A young man hires Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) to protect The Star of Rhodesia, a huge and valuable diamond, as his mother travels with it to Scotland. There is a murder, the rock is stolen, and Holmes solves the case.

I Initially watched this on Amazon Prime and found the audio and video quality to be quite poor. Five minutes also appeared to be missing. I rewatched it on Kanopy and there it was complete and the quality was significantly improved. I must remember this going forward.

Just about all of the film is set on a train, from the introduction of the case to the apprehension of the culprit. After the first murder, the action is further contained to a single car. Each compartment contains suspicious characters for our heroes (and inspector Lastrade of Scotland Yard) to question.

It has been two years since my last Sherlock film and it was high time I took steps towards finishing them. A focused setting, short run time, and interesting mystery makes Terror by Night one of the better in the series. Even on second viewing I found it fun to watch. AMRU 4, you know, because I rewatched it. Two more to go.

Ace in the Hole (1951)

Big shot reporter Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) must resort to working for a small-time newspaper in Albuquerque to crawl his way back to the top. Nothing breaks for him until he stumbles upon a story he can sink his teeth into. A man is trapped in an Indian cave and Chuck manipulates the sheriff, the townsfolk, even the man’s wife (Jan Sterling) to turn the story into a personal gold mine.

O’ll Chuck may be our main character but he is not a good guy. He is unabashed in his ambition to exploit a bad situation. He even brings the cub reporter along for the ride. Still, I found myself rooting for him a bit. But as he transitions from taking advantage of a desperate situation to taking control, his truer nature is revealed.

Sterling was no stranger to genre pictures, but this was a rare leading role for her. She played the self-involved ditz pretty well. Frank Cady played an early arrival at Chuck’s carnival. He was a recognizable character actor in many films, but will forever be remembered as Sam Drucker from Green Acres. It’s the place to be.

Native peoples are featured, somewhat in the background, but respectfully considering the day. Chuck calls a native man ‘chief’ but this informs us of Chuck’s character. That native was Iron Eyes Cody himself, the litter-hating Indian from my youth. Keep America Beautiful. His real name was Espera DeCorti. Speaking of bit parts, Timothy Carey may have had a bit part as a construction worker. It is unconfirmed. Remember him from Kubrick’s The Killing and Paths of Glory. He was a weirdo.

Ace in the Hole takes a bleak, cynical look at human nature. Chuck is the circus ring leader, but almost everyone is willing to jump through his hoops. Maybe not quite as much ironically hilarious dialog as one expects from Billy Wilder, but it is among his more important films. AMRU 4.

“Bad news sells best. ‘Cause good news is no news.”

I Was a Male War Bride (1949)

Cary Grant is French Captain Henri Rochard with a Cary Grant accent. He goes on one last mission and for the purposes of the story needs an American WAC to come along. That woman is Lieutenant Catherine Gates (Ann Sheridan), with whom they’ve had a troubled personal history. Details there are scarce. After implausibly falling in love, they face difficulties getting him into the US.

The film begins with Grant being chauffeured across a bombed out German city with up-beat and patriotic music playing in the background. The language barrier is played for laughs. This scene may not have bothered me had I not recently watched films like Two Women and Bicycle Thieves. Here, the consequence of war is that America is strong, rich, and happy. I can no longer ignore the other consequences.

Part one has our heroes looking for a German black marketeer named Schindler to convince him to move to Paris for some reason. In actuality, it is about our two heroes bumbling around, getting into predicaments, and expressing hate and distrust for each other. Through the power of a haystack, they fall in love.

Director Howard Hawks cast the supporting characters as he saw fit so the 52 year old chose his nineteen year old girlfriend. I’m not sure how much better an inappropriate relationship is than a casting couch, but here we are. The production was beset with illness, with Sheridan coming down with pleurisy and Grant contracting hepatitis, appearing visibly thinner in the second half.

The title refers to the plot point that while there is a process for a male soldier to bring a war bride back to America, there is not for a female soldier bringing home a foreign husband. I’m curious how true this is. They designate him a war ‘bride’ and hilarity is expected to ensue. To be fair, there was one joke that made me laugh out loud. It involves a sign post written in German, but much of the rest wasn’t very inspired. They bicker, there are misunderstandings, things go wrong for him, stuff like that. It’s “funny because it happens to somebody else” type comedy but it doesn’t work because Cary Grant is our hero. Well, my hero.

Grant called I was a Male War Bride one of the best comedies he had done. While it’s not his worst, it is far from his best. He and Ann Sheridan had little chemistry and their predicaments were mostly unfunny. I feel I am being generous by giving it an AMRU 3.

The Misfits (1961)

A divorced hot chick (Marilyn Monroe) and her landlady (Thelma Ritter) meet up with a tow truck driver (Eli Wallach) and his cowboy friend (Clark Gable). They later swap out the landlady for a troubled ranch hand (Montgomery Clift), then go rustling Mustangs. They all fall over Marilyn while she falls out of her dress.

Clark Gable was 59 going on 109 and would pass just after filming wrapped. He had said that working with Marilyn was going to give him a heart attack and, well, it seems he was right. He got in shape for the roll, quitting booze and losing weight, but too little, too late. There was a doctor on call but it was for the troubled Monroe and Clift. This would also prove to be Marilyn’s last film, dying of a semi-accidental drug overdose a year and a half later. Of the five principles, only Eli Wallach would see 1970, leaving us in 2014 at 98.

Maybe because he wasn’t playing the romantic lead, I liked Montgomery Clift’s performance. He played a neurotic, self-destructive cowboy. A role I suppose he could relate to. Except for the cowboy part. I’ll again repeat Marilyn’s quote about him: "the only person I know who is in worse shape than I am".

Not what I was expecting. There is a whole lot of ogling of Marilyn to the point where it seems to serve the dual purpose of making a point and appealing to men who like ogling Marilyn. She was 34 or 35 here and still effectively playing the 20-something bombshell, if maybe carrying a bit more weight than normal. It was said that they suspended production for two weeks so she could detox but that may have been a ruse to cover director John Huston’s gambling losses.

The four main characters (excluding Ritter’s landlady) are trying to figure out where they fit in. The aging cowboy out of touch in the new west, the tow truck driver dealing with the dead wife he worshiped, the young ranch hand not sure where he is going in life, and of course the divorcee who based her identity on the men who want her. You know, Misfits. They seem to come to terms with their issues, but it is not altogether clear.

The Misfits is an interesting film. Here we say goodbye to two icons of classic Hollywood. However I don’t know what to make of the overt “male gaze” aspect of the film. It felt very intentional. I may not see it again, but I do find myself thinking about it. AMRU 3.5.

"Honey, we all got to go sometime, reason or no reason. Dyin's as natural as livin'. The man who's too afraid to die is too afraid to live."