The Polynesian or South Sea Islands were an Eden-like paradise inhabited by simple, friendly, happy natives until they were spoiled by the encroachments of the white man’s civilization. At least, that’s the mythology that’s always been promulgated by the white writers and filmmakers who fell in love with the islands and told stories about them, giving the impression that they wished to tell the world while also keeping it to themselves. Three prime examples are now on Blu-ray.
Moana With Sound is a complicated project for such a simple movie. After Robert Flaherty’s success with Nanook of the North, which may be called the first blockbuster documentary (really an ethnographic drama), he took his family to the Samoan island of Savai’i and came back with Moana With Sound, a 1926 film designed to capture the people’s disappearing folkways.
Moana (played by Ta’avale) is a young man in a sarong who spends the movie fishing and hunting. Animal lovers be warned that we see a boar, a crab and a large turtle captured. Moana also hangs out with his tree-climbing little brother and dances with his girlfriend, who rubs oil on him in an erotic scene. Finally he’s tattooed in the grand climax because “manhood shall be won through pain”.
“Through this pattern of the flesh, to you perhaps no more than cruel, useless ornament, the Samoan wins the dignity, the character and fibre which keep his race alive”, says a title card. Actually, like the seal-hunting in Nanook, the tattooing was already a vanishing practice, demonstrated by the fact that the actor wasn’t tattooed already (nor others around him) and, as explained in a making-of, he stopped as soon as they had the shots and was replaced by another man, as we can tell by the patterns. It’s ironic that the “cruel, useless ornament” is more popular than ever in today’s industrial societies.
Pioneering documentary filmmaker John Grierson first used the word “documentary” in the context of cinema when reviewing this movie in 1926. A 1960 TV interview with Frances Flaherty, Robert’s widow, clarifies that she participated heavily in the filming and that the whole island population watched the rushes in an ongoing process and offered input. In other words, it became a communal effort in which the modernised locals collaborated with a project about their former ways, in contrast to the life-and-death struggle with the elements that Flaherty had originally conceived. Frances states that the experience taught him to shed preconceptions. That’s a refreshing detail.
Alas, it wasn’t the box office success of Nanook, despite its uncovered breasts. Daughter Monica Flaherty reunited with the cast after 50 years, recorded island sounds, and recruited young Samoans to record dialogue along with many songs, creating a soundtrack for the 1980 revival seen on this Blu-ray. The music is certainly appropriate to the extensive sequences of dancing, and the untranslated dialogue doesn’t mar the beauty of the original imagery. The extras provide good context. There’s also a short film Flaherty made about New York’s skyscrapers.
Tabu (1931)
German director F.W. Murnau persuaded Flaherty to help him shoot a Tahitian fable called Tabu (1931), in which locals enacted a picturesque romantic tragedy while the camera alternates gorgeous shadow work with sunstruck imagery of mostly unclad young men and sometimes bare-breasted women. When the girl (Reri, aka Anne Chevalier) is claimed as a vestal virgin for a local god, her boyfriend (Matahi) runs away with her, violating their culture’s “tabu” injunctions.
Here’s a movie that suggests local cultures don’t always facilitate the freedom of their people, especially where sexual transgression is concerned, and that’s a subtle balance to the movie’s depiction of the dispiriting depredations of foreign values like money. Murnau, a homosexual who died in a car crash before the film’s premiere (after securing a contract to shoot five more South Seas movies!), was sympathetic to beautiful young men who couldn’t achieve their desire without being punished.
As with Moana, the restored image can be called stunning, showing off Floyd Crosby’s Oscar-winning photography and giving good ear to Hugo Riesenfeld’s lyrical, semi-ethnic musical score. There’s a short inadequate making-of, outtakes, and a 1940 German short compiled by Murnau’s brother from unused footage. This restoration of Murnau’s vision is slightly longer than the original Paramount release. The movie could have used a commentary — and received one on an Image DVD that collectors will wish to keep in addition to this edition.
Hurricane (1937)
Tabu clearly influenced John Ford who, with his frequent screenwriter Dudley Nichols, was commissioned by classy producer Samuel Goldwyn to make The Hurricane (1937) from the bestselling novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, two Tahiti-lovers best known for the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy. As Ford biographer Joseph McBride explains in his excellent commentary, Ford and Nichols beefed up the racial/political content more than in the novel, so that the film becomes a genuine cry against injustice In a French colony. McBride argues that it also captures the world’s seething unrest in the face of imminent world war.
A perpetually shirtless islander and crack sailor named Terangi (Jon Hall) boasts that when he wears his first mate’s cap and sits down in a bar, “I’m the same as a white man.” If that sounds loaded coming from an actor who seems practically an Aryan poster-boy, McBride explains that Hall’s mother was Tahitian (and his father Swiss). When Terangi breaks the jaw of a French bully who tells him to “stand up when a white man talks to you”, he endures hellacious prison treatment under an oily sadist (John Carradine) while Terangi’s bride (Dorothy Lamour) pines away on Manakoora.
Terangi’s scenes with his wife definitely feel influenced by Murnau and still come across as hot stuff for the Hollywood ’30s, showing off an erotic “primitivism” and “naturalism” that contrasts strongly with the European characters and most of Hollywood’s American characters. It also contrasts with what we normally think of as a John Ford movie, although he could do lyrical expressionism. McBride does a fine job of connecting the dots with many of Ford’s other films, such as The Informer, The Prisoner of Shark Island and Seven Women.
Returning to this one: the uptight, spotless, white-suited colonial governor (Raymond Massey) refuses to intervene on Terangi’s behalf despite the harangues of a drunken doctor (Thomas Mitchell), the common sense of the governor’s wife (Mary Astor), or the melancholy profile of the Catholic priest (C. Aubrey Smith). Viewers know from the prologue that the colossal titular phenomenon will blow everything away — and how! Wow, is that sequence worth waiting for. Even with obvious model work and rear-projection (perhaps more noticeable in HD, which really shows off Bert Glennon’s photography), James Basevi’s tremendous effects give everyone a blasting and soaking, while the howling sound work was Oscar-nominated.
This remains one of the most impressive “disaster films”, driven by character, plot, and intelligent themes that work the viewer over before we get to the presumptive wrath of an Old Testament God, unless perhaps (no one floats this possibility) it’s the work of a local virgin-hunting deity like the one in Tabu. Where there’s paradise, there’s an angry god. So much for the mythology of escapism.