Le fou des îles

Although it's seldom discussed, one of the staple genres that classic Hollywood tackled best was the jungle-set melodrama. It gave studio technicians an opportunity to experiment with oppressive artificial sets, eerie sounds effects and expressionist lighting. Those Venetian-blind shadow patterns so characteristic of film noir were preceded by just as many painterly images lit through louvered windows and bamboo curtains. And the exotic backgrounds allowed jaded screenwriters to attain a delirious level of moral turpitude, betrayal, sadistic violence and erotic obsessiveness, not to mention downright racism. White Woman may not quite rank with the finest wallows in the white man's grave (Red Dust, Tropic Zone, the absolutely jaw-dropping Kongo), but it certainly concocts a heady stew of cruelty, masochism and lasciviousness. This is thanks to a dense script by some old reliables, and by another ingenious portrayal by Laughton (much more subdued than in the similarly-set masterpieces, the Beachcomber and Island of Lost Souls, but wilier and more self-deluding.) Lombard was still stuck in her earnest, victimized stage before she hit her stride as a comedienne, but her brittle blonde presence and flustered pretensions are a fine fit here. Charles Bickford kicks the plot into overdrive as a Gable-like he-man who won't brook Laughton's guff. They're a perfect match for each other playing a doomed hand of poker while their gruesome fate awaits them at the hands of the natives they've crossed. Thankfully, the filmmakers avoid the moralising and let the viewer stoically sink into the morass along with them.

They don't make them like this anymore. A lurid jungle picture with a fallen woman (the gorgeous LOMBARD)forced to sing in an interracial cafe after her husband commits suicide. No one in the African jungle British community wants anything to do with her. The British are there tearing up the jungle for the rubber plants and building huge rubber plantations. Rumor is her husband killed himself over her cheating ways. She's miserable and salvation comes along in the guise of Charles Laughton playing Horace Prin, the "King Of The River" - he's the richest rubber plantation owner in the jungle and he likes what he sees in Lombard. They marry, she's now rich but she's nothing more than one thing he owns and she begins to realize that he is obsessively jealous and insane and cruel. Laughton is amazing. A brilliant actor (from Witness For The Prosecution, Advise & Consent, Mutiny On The Bounty) who is capable of hamming it up for the sake of ham (Island Of Lost Souls, un-released Caligula)this is the hammiest performance I've ever seen but it is also so entertaining. He has a field day destroying any worker who dares to look at his new bride. What a hoot!!!

It's probably worth mentioning that this jungle islands "farrago", as Simon Callow calls it in his biography of Laughton, is set in Malaya, not Africa. In those days it was still part of the British Empire, which accounts for Laughton's cockney accent. In addition, at the dinner party on Laughton's river-boat (about 20 minutes into the film), his new wife (Carole Lombard) says she'd like to learn Malay.

This was the last of the handful of films which Laughton made for Paramount during 1932-33 under a short-term contract (the others being Devil and the Deep, Sign of the Cross, If I Had a Million, and Island of Lost Souls). Callow thinks Laughton's acting is both original and preposterous: "giggling and teasing and play-acting, screwing up his eyes, scratching his head, pulling at his moustache and using a whole battery of tics."

It's certainly preposterous that the Carole Lombard character would ever have considered marrying such an unpleasant person as Laughton makes him, so this fatally weakens the story. On the other hand, she has little choice, having been ostracised by the British community who would like to see the back of her. The mysterious suicide of her husband has forced her to earn a living singing in shady bars, so Laughton's proposal of marriage, coupled with his claim that he owns a great deal of land up river, offers a way out of her predicament. It's only when she arrives at his house-boat that she realises what she's got herself into, and seeks solace with some other, rather more pleasant, male members of the cast.

Laughton's Horace Prin has never been considered in the same breath as his Henry VIII, Captain Bligh, or Quasimodo. Even so, it is still probably worth seeing, if only as an example of his early Hollywood work.

Sensibilities have changed in 90 years that it's difficult to get into the swim with "White Woman", a well-shot and acted Paramount feature rooted in Colonialism but saved by the usual tour de force performance by Charles Laughton. It's hard to imagine another actor in his role.

Opening reel seems to be a familiar tale of prejudice and ostracism: star Carole Lombard looking fabulous and even singing (direct sound) a couple of torch songs as a cafe singer down on her luck in some Far East British colony (likely set in Straits Settlements). Her husband committed suicide, and folks look down on her working in a cafe frequented by locals.

But soon she's married Laughton, self-proclaimed King of the RIver, who from humble beginnings has bought up most of the island. With a unique walrus moustache, he's a very odd fellow, full of sarcasm and even some self-deprecatory humor as he lords it over all and sundry. A couple fo studs understandably lust after Lombard, with the sjurprise of Charles Bickford, young and overconfident, even taking a shower and having an unlikely beefcake role.

When Laughton literally spits in the faces of a couple of higher-rank natives, things look glum for the white folks, as a rebellion begins. Chuck has a couple of impressive machine guns with plenty of ammo for just such an occasion, but he's thwarted byt the white guys he keeps under his thumb working for him, leading to a truly memorable climax, in which violence is tastefully delivered off-screen.

Carole Lombard is singing Cole Porter-style songs in a native bar. She's an outcast because she went off with a man and her husband killed himself. In comes "King of the River" Charles Laughton. He marries her and takes her upriver, where all the White men have something in their background that would get them jailed -- at best.

The movie looks like a badly aged mash-up of other, better remembered stories from the era: RAIN, of course, and RED RIVER with Charles Bickford as the he-man, and SANDERS OF THE RIVER. Although Lombard is the protagonist for the most of the movie, and Bickford looks like he's going to take it over when he enters for the third act, it's Laughton, playing one of his grotesques who dominates the film, from his entrance until the very end, when he is the only White standing, shouting defiance. Just like in other movies of the era, he's so good at playing a fascinating villain who despises everyone else... until he throws it all away in an act of mad bravado, to impress Lombard.