Movie Review: Reap The Wild Wind (1942)

A colourful maritime epic, Reap The Wild Wind has a bit of everything but not much of anything.

It's the 1840s, and Key West, Florida is a key marine gateway to the United States. Vessels frequently wreck in the rough seas, and salvage operators rush to rescue sailors and retrieve cargo. Rough and ready Loxie Claiborne (Paulette Goddard) runs a legitimate salvage company, while her rivals King Cutler (Raymond Massey) and his brother Dan (Robert Preston) are more interested in causing wrecks for profits. As a further complication, Dan is secretly in love with Loxie's cousin Drusilla (Susan Hayward).

The Cutlers' chicanery causes the ship captained by Jack Stuart (John Wayne) to wreck. Loxie rescues Jack and they fall in love. He dreams of captaining the Southern Cross, a modern steam boat owned by shipping tycoon Commodore Devereaux. Loxie travels to Charleston and flirts with Steven Tolliver (Ray Milland), Stuart's rival and Deveroux's influential second-in-command, to try and secure the Southern Cross command for Stuart. Instead, Tolliver falls in love with Loxie. Tolliver travels to Key West to investigate the Cutlers, heating up the love triangle but also forcing Tolliver and Stuart to cooperate to try and stop the escalating series of shipwrecks.

Produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille, Reap The Wild Wind is a bright, boisterous, and busy adventure. The story hops between the bustling port of Key West and the much more refined and civilized Charleston, with frequent sailings out to sea to experience the world of cargo ships in rough waters and the salvage crews who either provide assistance or prey on misfortune. The production values are high, the screen pops with colour, the costumes are lavish, hordes of extras populate every corner of the screen, and the sets and special effects are state of the art for the era.

With no shortage of characters and events, the film breezes through the two hours of running time, and DeMille somehow contrives to end his epic with a dangerous underwater dive featuring a massive angry squid, but only after the film takes a substantive detour into courtroom drama territory.

The romantic triangle and underhanded business alliances crackle away as DeMille alternates between affairs of the heart and cut-throat underhanded double-crosses. It's all happening all the time, not a surprise given that Reap The Wild Wind is based on a newspaper serialization. The film benefits from the brisk fun factor, and also suffers from the consequent lack of depth and any sense of lasting substance.

Loxie is in the middle of everything, an irrepressible independent woman well ahead of her time in a man's world, and Goddard injects the necessary energy to allow Loxie to drive the film ever forward. The men are more troublesome and less worthy, rendering the romance moments more irritating than engaging. Ray Milland as Tolliver is foppish, bland and abusive, and worst of all attached to silly dog ventriloquist tricks. John Wayne as Stuart is sturdy but maybe none too bright, and the fistfights between the two men erupt all too predictably.

Reap The Wild Wind is undoubtedly entertaining, and just as definitely sailing in shallow waters.

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Movie Review: The Women (1939)

A stylish view of life through the eyes of an all-female cast of characters, The Women is a whirlwind tour of what occupies New York's upper class. And for the women of high society, the main topic of obsession is men.

Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) is sweet and trusting, the loyal wife of Stephen (none of the men are ever seen or heard) and mother of Little Mary (Virginia Weidler). Mary's cousin Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) visits the beauty salon to get the latest Jungle Red nail colour, and learns from the gossipy manicurist that Stephen is having an affair with department store perfume seller Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford). The news spreads rapidly, and eventually reaches Mary. Initially Mary is respectful of the wishes of her mother (Lucile Watson) to keep her marriage intact, but eventually she confronts Crystal and then Stephen before deciding to get a divorce.

Mary travels to Reno, where divorces are quickly handed out to women marching out of their marriages. On the train she meets Countess de Lave (Mary Boland), who has divorced numerous husbands, the spirited Miriam (Paulette Goddard), and the delicate Peggy (Joan Fontaine). In Reno they all stay at the ranch house of the outspoken Lucy (Marjorie Main), who readily doles out advice to her guests. As Mary moves into a new phase of her life as a single woman, there is a nasty surprise in store courtesy of Stephen and Crystal, while Sylvia gets a shock of her own, leading to new alliances among the ladies of New York.

Directed by George Cukor, working to earn his title as a "women' director", The Women is a talky, often boisterous movie. Based on Clare Boothe Luce's play, this is a story set in the salons, gyms, kitchens, department stores, fashion boutiques and living rooms occupied solely by women. And the ladies talk and talk and talk, sometimes too quickly, often interrupting each other, at other times screaming in delight or anger. Nothing happens in the film other than what is talked about, in person or over the phone, and the stories of failing marriages, sordid affairs, divorces, pregnancies and revenge are all recounted through shared gossip or conversations often delivered at a rapid pace.

And ironically for this man-free zone, the lives of the women are almost solely preoccupied by their men. Mary and her friends are obsessed with the thoughts, actions, feelings of their husbands and lovers. Liberated as they are by 1939 standards, the lives of these upper class women are dominated by continuous plans to win, please, defend, support, seduce or punish their men. Other than one gossip columnist, none of the women appear to have any jobs worth mentioning, and the precocious Little Mary requires limited parenting, leaving the women plenty of time to exchange sharp barbs and hatch men-related schemes.

At more than 130 minutes in length, The Women is packed with...women. If the film has a weakness, it's in the large number of characters, often introduced in a hurry and proceeding to contribute a ton of verbiage. It's sometimes difficult to keep track of - or care about - all the multitudes of women who have to have their say. And inserted into the middle of the film is a technicolour fashion show sequence that is both jarringly out of place and a welcome respite from the overflowing rivers of estrogen.

The performances of the lead actresses are bright, energetic and catchy. Shearer gets the most extended and sympathetic role, and is generally closest to the relative sanity of reality. Russell is larger than life, sassy, funny and ensures that Sylvia is unable to control her urge to gossip, the girl who makes the world go round until it smacks her in the face. Crawford has few scenes, but Shearer's real-life rival vamps up the screen with a claws-out performances full of naked, marriage-wrecking ambition. Goddard and Fontaine also shine in smallish roles.

The Women gently takes some humorous pokes at its heroines while celebrating their emotional strength, resourcefulness and determination. These women may need their men, but they certainly also know how to thrive in their man-free havens.

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