This remake of a 1926 silent film starring Gilda Gray and directed by Maurice Tourneur is a top-drawer South Seas romance. A Tahitian chief selects a bride for his young son who is then sent off for a Harvard education. Upon his return aboard Overman's ship--the captain acting as mentor to
Hall and protector to Lamour--the youth, now grown into Hall, is determined not to marry someone promised to him 15 years earlier. Hall meets Lamour, not knowing she is his intended, and both fall deeply in love. The match is almost interrupted by a jealous native girl, DeMille, and even more
vengeance-seeking sub-chieftain Reed, the latter trying to kill Hall several times so he can have Lamour. Hall manages to escape Reed's wrath in the middle of a volcanic eruption that almost destroys the entire island, standing at film's end with Lamour atop a rocky crag, looking out to sea at a
fading sun of rich red.
The film earned Oscar nominations for it color cinematography and special effects, both of which are outstanding. The songs and dances are authentic and well choreographed. Though the story is somewhat lightweight and borrows a bit from THE HURRICANE in which Hall and Lamour doubled as a love team
for the first dynamic time, director Santell keeps the film moving at a brisk trot through exotic settings. The color quality and lighting allow the eyes to feast. The color process used in this film, known as IB Technicolor, produced the richest colors ever on film, laboriously and expensively
made by superimposing three strips of tinted film which were then treated with vegetable coloring, a process that, unlike the emulsion process employed after WW II, guaranteed the color lasting almost forever, whereas in the later process the color simply wears out. Oddly, the Hollywood moguls,
after WW II, felt that the IB Technicolor process was simply too expensive and time-consuming and sold all of the studio equipment for this process to China, which has continued to use it, providing incredibly rich color for its films; when US and other production companies now wish to use this
process they must go to China and pay a premium price, far in excess of what it would have cost had the equipment been retained--another massive faux pas on the part of less than visionary Louis B. Mayer and company. leave a comment