Le banni des îles

Although he made a handful of worthwhile films before them and won a competitive Oscar much later, Carol Reed is still most admired for his immediate post-WWII work: ODD MAN OUT (1947), THE FALLEN IDOL (1948), THE THIRD MAN (1949) – all of them BAFTA winners – and the movie under review. The latter is the least-seen and least-regarded of the lot (perhaps because there are very few sympathetic characters in it!) but emerges a remarkable achievement nevertheless, with the director's sure hand more than evident in several striking sequences throughout. It features a great cast, all of whom deliver splendid performances: Trevor Howard (second-billed but clearly the protagonist here), Ralph Richardson, Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller, George Coulouris (as an English-speaking native!), Wilfrid Hyde-White and Frederick Valk.

While the Far East atmosphere is undeniably vivid and captivating (and John Wilcox's cinematography suitably gleaming), this never draws attention away from the complex character study at the center of Joseph Conrad's typically sea-based and compelling plot line (which works its way up to an abrupt yet memorable ending) about a rogue trader driven mad by lust for a native girl (the silent Kerima) and delusions of grandeur a' la Kurtz in the same author's "Heart Of Darkness". For the record, OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS was also a BAFTA nominee, was apparently shorn of 8 minutes for U.S. TV screenings and is featured in cult American film-maker Monte Hellman's All-Time Top 10 list, apart from being championed by eminent movie critics like Pauline Kael and David Thomson!

Despite being of Polish descent and not learning English until his twenties Joseph Conrad became one of the greatest writers in the English language. His novels are deeply pessimistic and depict Man as being able neither to escape nor elude his destiny. To say that his works are unfilmable would be an overstatement but they certainly pose particular challenges. Such a pity that David Lean's plan to direct Conrad's late work 'Nostromo' did not come to fruition.

Here we have his second novel directed by another of our truly great directors Carol Reed. Although Reed's films of the 1960's show a distinct falling off, this comes from a period when he is really 'on form'. There are changes from the novel but that is par for the course where film adaptations are concerned. Conrad was fascinated by the nature of evil and here it is personified by Trevor Howard as Willems who plays his part with tremendous relish. Ralph Richardson brings his presence to bear as Lingard although his appearance is rather pantomimic. Robert Morley and Wendy Hiller are excellent as Mr. And Mrs. Almayer but her role is underwritten and 'ambiguous' to say the least.

In the novel Willems dies but here he is left to exist in the living hell he has created for himself and Aissa, played by Kerima, whose sexual magnetism has caused so much destruction. Willems has described his feelings for her as 'something between love and hate but stronger' and this ambivalence is powerfully depicted.

Reed and adaptor William Fairchild have ended the film with a masterful shot of Aissa lowering her head in despair. This sweeping and mesmerising film with a majestic score by Brian Easdale is from a director at the top of his game.

British drama based on a book by Joseph Conrad. Trevor Howard stars as middle manager in a Far East shipping company. When he's found to have been embezzling, he's virtually exiled and runs of with his old friend, ship captain Ralph Richardson. Ralph takes him to a remote island paradise and instructs Trevor to learn the ways of their trading business with local overseer Robert Morley. However, Howard slowly succumbs to his worst impulses in the never-ending heat and boredom of island life.

I really wanted to like this one more than I did. The direction from Carol Reed is good, although things drag in a few places. The cinematography is very good; one of the camera operators was Freddie Francis. Guy Hamilton also worked as the assistant director. My chief problem with the film was the Howard character. I haven't read the source novel, and perhaps it provided more of the inner voice of the character, but as he stands in the film, he's completely unlikable, and not in a compelling or entertaining way. He's just a boring, self-centered jerk.

The natives are presented in a less-than-flattering light as well, which is exacerbated by having one of them be George Coulouris in dark body paint. I've also never been fond of Robert Morley. He's an irritating ham and he's unpleasant to even look at. That's terrible to say, I suppose, but in a visual medium, it's a valid point. His real-life daughter played his on-screen daughter here, and she's just as annoying.

I remember making an occasion of my 50th "user comments" by electing to write about a film that I found rather special, Carol Reed's "The Third Man". I concluded those comments by saying that I would take the opportunity to write about Reed's one remaining great film, "Outcast of the Islands", as my hundredth contribution, so here goes. We had left school by the time "Outcast" appeared so opportunities for quizzes during breaks no longer existed. Instead a group of us would visit the cinema together once a week and when walking home would give each other a slot of about ten minutes in which to extemporise a criticism of what we had just seen. This would certainly have been our "Outcast" game as we devoured everything Reed gave us. He was in fact our God. Although much of his work now seems a little dated and I am not at all sure that "Odd Man Out" or "The Fallen Idol" are quite the masterworks that we thought they were at the time, critical acclaim seems undiminished for "The Third Man". This has never been quite the case with "Outcast" although it found a great devotee in Pauline Kael who described it as "a marvellous film". It is a work that grabs you from the very first shot of a seething mass of natives and even an elephant on a dockside in the Far East and sweeps you forward with its tremendous pace and the director's sheer love of bravura cinema. It doesn't quite conform to any of the conventional genres being hardly an adventure thriller, a romance or a tragedy and yet it has elements of all three. I suppose one would have to call it high melodrama, a film, epic in its detail and scope yet more concerned with integrating its vast gallery of images of local colour into its narrative than bursting into big set-pieces of action. Films about anti-heroes have never had great box office success, much less those where the anti-hero is weak through and through. Was it this that doomed Wyler's greatest film "Carrie" to near oblivion and was partly the reason for the neglect of "Outcast of the Islands"? And yet to ignore Trevor Howard's marvellous portrayal of Joseph Conrad's pathetically inadequate Willems would be to pass over one of British cinema's finest performances. And then there is that great actor Ralph Richardson as Captain Lingard whose Achilles heel is the misplaced trust he places in Willems. His portrayal has been seen as over the top by some but I would defend it to the hilt for its quality of Shakespearian declamation that is all part and parcel of Reed's directorial style. So often during his work of this period he shoots his scenes, particularly those between two characters, as if they are taking place on a huge theatrical stage. They shout at each other across large spaces, an effect that gives such scenes tremendous strength and resonance. The final sequence of "Outcast" between Howard and Richardson where they employ this device during the sudden outbreak of a tropical rainstorm is so powerful it has haunted me for years. It is possibly the single greatest scene in all Reed's work. Although he managed to retain his uniquely individual style of cinema throughout the subsequent "The Man Between" and the early part of "A Kid for Two Farthings", he was working with much less interesting scripts. That he ultimately lost even his stylistic fingerprints in later works such as "The Agony and the Ecstasy" and "The Running Man" is one of cinema's greatest tragedies.

When the Marlon Brando version of Mutiny On The Bounty came out one of the scenes I remember is Trevor Howard remonstrating with Brando after finding him getting ready to get down to business with Tarita about controlling his lust. Captain Bligh would have had little use for the character that Howard plays in Outcast Of The Island where his lust truly gets the better of him.

Those tropical islands have always had a certain allure to us westerners, but this movie based on a Joseph Conrad novel clearly demonstrates the problem of having too much of a good thing. Howard's been in the area for years and he's indulged all the readily available vices too much for too long. When he's caught stealing it might be the end for him.

But an old friend trading captain Ralph Richardson takes pity on him and takes him from Singapore to a small island where his son-in-law Robert Morley lives with wife Wendy Hiller and real life daughter Annabel Morley. Richardson deposits him there, not that Morley truly wants him.

It doesn't take long for Howard to start stirring things up and all of his schemes and machinations involve a bad case overwhelming lust for the beautiful Kerima. She certainly is something to lust over. In the end she brings about his total ruination.

The central character among the Occidentals is Howard, but Richardson and Morley aren't any model specimens either. Richardson's main concern is keeping a monopoly of the trade there. The harbor is inaccessible for the most part, but Richardson knows a narrow navigable passageway through the reefs so he monopolizes the trade. And he's pretty ruthless about keeping his monopoly.

As for Morley he's one uptight businessman. The prior relationship between Richardson and Morley is taken up in a previous Conrad novel and sad to say if you haven't read that book, a lot of it will elude the viewer.

Hiller is good, but sadly wasted in a role of a woman trapped in a bad situation. She's got an unrequited yen for Howard, but she's still a faithful wife, just like Jean Arthur in Shane.

Outcast Of The Island is a most atypical South Seas story. Conrad's vision is not fully realized by the film, but the players all do a fine job with what they are given.