La loi des tropiques

Only a few years earlier, Warner Brothers made "Oil for the Lamps in China"...and remade it as "Law of the Tropics". Such things were very common for the studio...and they even sometimes made remakes only a couple years later! I loved the first film...what about this remake?

The plots are very, very similar. The only main difference I saw is that the remake was set in South America, not China as well as the film being a little less of an indictment about corporate greed and indifference.

Instead of top actors, however, in the remake they used second-tier ones. Constance Bennett, once a bit star, had a career tailspin...probably, sadly, due to her age. Jeffery Lynn was never a top star but a competent B-movie actor. Despite this, they both did a very nice job and the film is STILL good....just not quite as good as the first one.

Bennett has top billing, which must have been some consolation for starring in this story of a torch singer in the tropics attempting to elude the law. The film is OK - and it has several pleasing songs sung by a trio of tropical lads - but the presence of Bennett does not raise it from "B" to "A" status. Maybe Jack Warner wanted to help his old poker partner by giving her a job. And she took it because, according to her biographer, she hadn't put away so much as a dime for the inevitable rainy days and she needed the money to support her palatial lifestyle.

Although the former #1 glamour queen of Hollywood is only 36, she is not looking especially fabulous in this film. But Mona Maris, a dead ringer for Bennett's poker playing comrade, Kay Francis, does look fabulous. Unlike Bennett, Francis did save her money for a rainy day, but when the rainy day came she found it impossible to go quietly into obscurity and she too made a few "B" films. Both ladies, like so many other former femme stars out of fashion, took up live theatre in the late 40s. Bennett fans are advised to skip this film and watch Topper instead.

Good movie with the usual plot. Girl doesn't go with intended (always different reasons) and other girl (in this case Constance Bennett) falls in love (with Jeffrey Lynn). He gets telegram and drinks because of being jilted. But they are all good serviceable actors and the top four in the film are as good as any known star or character actor. So, why do some make "it" and some not so much? It comes down to whether you like them when you see them or not. They catch your eye AND THAT'S IT GENERALLY SPEAKING!!

After just seeing the glorious Constance Bennett at her peak in "What Price Hollywood?" it is sad to see her, at the age of 36, in a B movie, but there you are - welcome to the world of being a middle-aged leading woman in films back in the golden age. She was in good company. In her next film, she would play a supporting role in an A movie that drove 36-year-old Greta Garbo out of Hollywood: Two-Faced Woman.

Bennett at this advanced age (hah!) was still beautiful, but it was hard to tell underneath the fright wig she wore. This improved when she put her hair up later on in the film. She plays a singer who marries Jeffrey Lynn (at age 32, he looks to be much younger than Bennett somehow) in order to escape a detective who's been chasing her. An inventor in a managerial position on a rubber plantation in South America, he wants to bring back a wife, so the two make a deal. Along the way, of course, they fall in love.

This is a pleasant movie, helped by the likability of the key players: Bennett, Lynn, Regis Toomey, and the gorgeous Mona Maris, who plays Toomey's wife. Craig Stevens, then very young and very hunky, has a small part as the owner's son, but he's involved in possibly the best scene, a fight between Lynn and himself.

Bennett deserved better. Shortly before leaving films in 1951, she was honored for her work on behalf of the post-war occupying troops and the Berlin Airlift. In the '50s, she did a club act, returning to movies in 1965, where she looked stunning as John Forsythe's mother in "Madame X." She died shortly afterward. She went out the way she came in.

Jeffrey Lynn works on a rubber plantation. He's on a week's holiday in town to get married with his girl from the States. Instead he gets a 'Dear John' letter. Instead he marries Constance Bennett in a marriage of convenience. They head back upriver, where they fall in love with each other. What he doesn't know is that she's wanted for murder back home.

It's a satisfactory B version of OIL FOR THE LAMPS OF CHINA, eked out with some good performances like Hobart Bosworth as the manager, an amusing turn by Frank Puglia, and Thomas E. Jackson as, of course, a detective. The ending is abrupt, but at 75 minutes, that's an epic length for a Bryan For production.