It's back to the plantation, one of those British rubber-tree operations somewhere in Africa, where a handful of quinine-popping/malaria-wary Whites oversee a large Black labor force. Barely adapted from a once ‘daring’ ‘20s B’way play, this decidedly stagebound film has to drop its big scandalous selling point since the Hollywood Production Code would never allow a White man to marry a Black woman in ‘42. So, suitably Max Factor’d, Hedy Lamaar (tan & terrific as seen in this Euro-poster, lily-white in all U.S. artwork) gets Egyptian/Arab parentage as Tondelayo*, amoral/avaricious local siren provocatively strutting between Walter Pidgeon’s jungle-hardened foreman and Richard Carlson’s fast-fading, idealistic assistant. While Dipsomaniac Doc Frank Morgan & Practical Pastor Henry O’Neill make up the rest of the film’s ‘Four White Men in 100 Square Miles’ and cheer from the sidelines. This claptrap actually something of a step up for workhorse B-pic director Richard Thorpe. Maybe that’s why he lets his cast chew the scenery and play to the back of the house. Pidgeon really off-leash, perhaps in protest for the assignment after starring in last year’s and this year’s Best Pics: HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY/’41; MRS. MINIVER/’42. On the other hand, Lamaar, realizing she was suddenly out of favor @ M-G-M, at least has a bit of fun under the makeup; expressing marital disappointment with lines like, ‘Married five months and you not beat me once!’
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: With Ben Hecht protégé John Lee Mahin on script, M-G-M once knew how to pull off Rubber Plantation tropes: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Mary Astor in RED DUST/’32 under director Victor Fleming. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/red-dust-1932.html
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Playwright/drag artist Charles Busch, who specializes in heightening this sort of diva drama for comic effect on stage (brilliantly) and screen (less brilliantly), would have to tone this one down.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *‘Tondelaya’ on this poster; ‘Tondelayo’ in the film; ‘Tondeleyo’ in the original play. Who gets paid to make these calls?
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