The Narrow Corner

In his efforts to find interesting roles to play during his contract days at Warner Brothers Pictures Douglas Fairbanks Jr. chose the part of Fred Blake, the troubled repentant hero of W.Somerset Maugham's novel 'The Narrow Corner'. As adapted by Robert Presnell and directed by Alfred E.Green, the story has young Doug,a former playboy pressured by his wealthy father to escape a manslaughter charge in Australia until the heat is off.The young man is spirited away aboard a disreputable schooner captained by an even less reputable skipper who has been paid to keep him distant from the law and further involvement with troublesome females.But,as fate would have it,after surviving a typhoon,the little ship puts in for repairs at an island paradise peopled by Danish settlers. Through the kindness of the inhabitants and particularly by the innocence of lovely Patricia Ellis and the comraderie of Ralph Bellamy,Fairbanks Jr. begins to mature as a responsible adult.However, tragedy lurks just around the corner.

The essential philosophy and moral of novelist Maugham is retained throughout this wonderful film.In great supporting roles are Arthur Hohl as the coarse,vulgar skipper,Reginald Owen as the girl's eccentric father, and Dudley Digges as the world-weary,opium-addicted physician.The film was remade with plot differences a few years later as 'Isle of Fury' with Humphrey Bogart!

For an alleged 'B' movie they sure threw a budget at this, with not one but two storm-at-sea scenes. This should have been a better movie: Doug Jr is ideally cast as Fred Blake, and the other male parts are well cast, even Ralph Bellamy as a Dane once you get used to the idea, and the accent which seems more Norwegian than Danish to me. The main problems are two: (1) the girl is too young and inadequate to the part, and (2) they tried to get too much of the book into a bit over an hour: the entire sequence about the manuscript could have been deleted without loss, and there are a couple of other very entertaining incidents in the book that could have replaced it. Or maybe it should have been made to a 80-90 minute length. This seems to have been a case of Warner Bros. Still not quite knowing what exactly it was doing ... and blaming Doug Jr.

In Sydney, Australia, bear-drinking captain Arthur Hohl (as Nichols) is hired by likewise burping Sidney Toler (as Ryan) to take handsome Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (as Fred Blake) on an extended South Pacific Ocean voyage. Harboring some dark secret, Mr. Fairbanks must lay low for approximately a year. They pick up opium-addicted doctor Dudley Digges (as Saunders) before setting sail. After a storm, Fairbanks takes off all his clothes and swims to an island where he meets pretty Patricia Ellis (as Louise Frith). They fall in love, but she is promised to reliable Ralph Bellamy (as Eric Whittenson). The romance is strained and the otherwise interesting W. Somerset Maugham characters come across as hysterical.

**** The Narrow Corner (7/8/33) Alfred E. Green ~ Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Patricia Ellis, Ralph Bellamy, Dudley Digges

W. Somerset Maugham certainly loved the South Seas. Like some more of his favorite works, Rain and The Moon And Sixpence, The Narrow Corner is also set in that location.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. has just killed a man in Sydney and is looking to make a fast escape. His father Henry Kolker charters Arthur Hohl's schooner to make for the Dutch East Indies. Hohl is a real bottom feeder who has stomach problems. They pick up Dr. Dudley Digges who is another of those Europeans who has 'gone native'. He's Maugham's presence as a character in the story.

When they finally settle on an island to their liking it's got both the lovely Patricia Ellis and Danish settler Ralph Bellamy there. When Fairbanks arrives it becomes a triangle and it ends in tragedy for one of them.

It seems that a common theme in these Maugham stories that the tropics somehow loosens the inhibitions that civilization puts on us. Definitely the case for the cast of The Narrow Corner.

The Narrow Corner is not as good as the other two Maugham stories I've cited. It has some fine special effects with Fairbanks trying to steer his schooner past a reef barrier during a windy and wavy tide. The high point of the film.

If you're a Maugham fan or fan of any of the cast, I'd try to see this one.

The Narrow Corner has the advantage of having Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as the star and a great supporting cast, including Patricia Ellis, who never looked prettier in any of her other Warner Bros. movies. The movie also has ace director Alfred Green, who shows his stuff near the start of the movie, using rear projections to show a boat going through a storm with really high waves. This is a 1933 movie, and even coming close to showing a boat weathering high waves in a storm showed real technical skill (a skill not matched by the production crew in a later scene when Fairbanks' character navigates a boat through a narrow island reef during another storm). But then Warner Bros. kept a tight rein on budgets, so even with quick edits, Green had problems making some of the later seagoing scenes look passably authentic. Some of the later shots using boat models were just bad. But those first scenes of the boat weathering a storm were done very well for 1933. As to the story about a young man changing as he goes on a forced voyage, the story gave Warner Bros. a chance to use it its repertory company of actors in a South Seas setting. In about 70 minutes, the Depression-era movie audiences then had a chance to see characters with real problems in a distant setting. Darryl Zanuck's quitting as head of production at Warner Bros. in 1933, and the coming of the strict Production Code in 1934, ended any chance that would be more movies like The Narrow Corner. Soon, there would be mostly whitebread, asexual movies coming from Warner Bros., minus the cynicism, single entendres and negative overtones that the Code censored out of Hollywood movies.