I guess the joke was on me for not realizing that John Hall's mother was Tahitian. Until I found that out, I thought it was utterly ridiculous that he was playing a Pacific Islander in this John Ford film. I didn't even know he was supposed to be Tahitian until he gets a line a few scenes into the movie where he tells Dorothy Lamour that he likes being at sea because everyone treats him like a white man. I was like, "huh? As opposed to what?" And then later, some dude in a cantina tells him he needs to give his seat up when a white man tells him to, and I was like, "Why is this white dude telling this other white dude to give up his seat?"
So if you're going to watch "The Hurricane," I've hopefully just saved you a half hour or so of being confused. Every single online review of this movie talks about the big storm scene at the end. Even TCM host Ben Mankiewicz couldn't think of anything else to say about this movie. That's because there isn't much of a movie before that. Oh, there's movie in the sense that there is literally 90 minutes of things happening on screen. But there's very little in the way of plot, and really only the two main characters are developed at all, so there's not a lot of suspense when the storm does hit because I didn't care that much about what happened to anyone. And even the two leads aren't developed exactly, beyond they just really love each other and want to be together.
Lamour looks very lovely, and John Hall is a bit of a hunkadoodle. Both of them spend almost the entire film wearing nothing much more than some fabric covering their naughty parts, so if you like a bit of skin in your movies, this one's for you.
"The Hurricane" is a bit of an oddity for a John Ford film, mostly because it's so lightweight in the plot and theme departments. There is some criticism of white colonialism, which seems right up Ford's alley, but it doesn't hit that theme too hard and instead stays mostly content to be a swoony romance.
Mary Astor is absolutely wasted in this film. Seriously, I'm not even sure why she was in it. Raymond Massey gets villain honors, and Thomas Mitchell received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for playing a drunk doctor. Did Mitchell every play anyone who wasn't at least a few sheets to the wind?
The film won the Oscar for Best Sound Recording. No award for special effects yet existed in 1937, and apparently this film was one of the reasons a special effects category would be created two years later. It also received a nomination for Alfred Newman's scoring.
Grade: B.
So if you're going to watch "The Hurricane," I've hopefully just saved you a half hour or so of being confused. Every single online review of this movie talks about the big storm scene at the end. Even TCM host Ben Mankiewicz couldn't think of anything else to say about this movie. That's because there isn't much of a movie before that. Oh, there's movie in the sense that there is literally 90 minutes of things happening on screen. But there's very little in the way of plot, and really only the two main characters are developed at all, so there's not a lot of suspense when the storm does hit because I didn't care that much about what happened to anyone. And even the two leads aren't developed exactly, beyond they just really love each other and want to be together.
Lamour looks very lovely, and John Hall is a bit of a hunkadoodle. Both of them spend almost the entire film wearing nothing much more than some fabric covering their naughty parts, so if you like a bit of skin in your movies, this one's for you.
"The Hurricane" is a bit of an oddity for a John Ford film, mostly because it's so lightweight in the plot and theme departments. There is some criticism of white colonialism, which seems right up Ford's alley, but it doesn't hit that theme too hard and instead stays mostly content to be a swoony romance.
Mary Astor is absolutely wasted in this film. Seriously, I'm not even sure why she was in it. Raymond Massey gets villain honors, and Thomas Mitchell received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for playing a drunk doctor. Did Mitchell every play anyone who wasn't at least a few sheets to the wind?
The film won the Oscar for Best Sound Recording. No award for special effects yet existed in 1937, and apparently this film was one of the reasons a special effects category would be created two years later. It also received a nomination for Alfred Newman's scoring.
Grade: B.