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The bleak feint is on W. Somerset Maugham, mainly Rain and The Letter, giving rise to a concentrated William Wellman vision in the tropics. The New Orleans call girl (Dorothy Mackaill) leaves the smarmy john (Ralf Harolde) brained in a burning building, next stop is the remote Caribbean island, "for her health." (The voyage there finds her concealed in a cargo crate, only her lips and nose are visible between horizontal slats as the screen sways to the sea.) Her sailor beau (Donald Cook) conducts a makeshift wedding in an empty church and takes off, she's left to defend her honor against a gallery of seamy expatriates. "The centipedes are rather thick on the hillside this time of year." Plenty of "slimy wrigglers," floating on water bowls and slouching on wicker chairs: Revolutionary (Victor Varconi), drunkard (John Wray), arsonist (Gustav von Seyffertitz), safecracker (Ivan F. Simpson), each gets a turn being shot down by the hard-boiled blonde. Lucifer in the humid inferno dons white Panama hat and stogie, thus the vile warden (Morgan Wallace) out of Faulkner or Gogol. "So they say my jail is worse than my gallows, eh?" Clarence Muse with a British accent, Nina Mae McKinney doing a torchy "When It's Sleepy Time Down South" while setting the table, solitary pockets of sympathy in the swamp. The heroine who in vain ponders the oceanic horizon and twice kills the same lecher, purity amid the grime in the pre-Code yarn of all pre-Code yarns. The last-minute rescue of love, denied, the end of a nightmare is the private victory of a death sentence. "Women haven't got any sense." "Mine has." Under Capricorn, Stromboli, Le Salaire de la peur... With Charles Middleton, Noble Johnson, and Cecil Cunningham. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |