South Sea Sinning --- Part One
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| Scurrilous Whites Ply Trade Among Exploited Natives |
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| Director W.S. Van Dyke Receives Radio Instructions from Metro Home Base |
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| W.S. Van Dyke, at left, Receives Fan Magazine Writers from the States on White Shadows Location |
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| Ramon Novarro and Dorothy Janis as South Sea Natives in The Pagan |
posted by John McElwee at 6:00 AM
4 Comments:
Hi, John..
Thank you for your most informative blog. I never miss an entry. FYI...there are several available first edition copies of the book, "Van Dyke and The Mythical City Hollywood" on the net for sale. I even found one with an inscription from the author to Howard Smit (make up artist: THE BIRDS etc.). At only $35 I thought you might be interested. Let me know and I'll provide a link. (note: I am not the seller) Franco
Dan Mercer speaks to W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, and "White Shadows In The South Seas." (Part One):
I agree with you that W. S. Van Dyke was a much better director than his nickname, “One-Take Woody,” would suggest. He was quick and efficient and produced many profitable entertainments, such as The Thin Man, Manhattan Melodrama, and San Francisco, but he also brought a lyrical grace to a wide variety of films, from White Shadows in the South Seas to Marie Antoinette, the latter an elaborate costume film which would have been an elephantine bore in the hands of nearly anyone else.
Robert Flaherty is another matter entirely. A prospector and agent for the Hudson’s Bay Company, he got into film making as a way of passing time during the long wait for a ship to come in. Eventually he turned his north country experiences into the strange and exotic Nanook of the North, about an Eskimo family’s struggle to live. It became a freak hit, and Flaherty was given backing to make what was in effect a Southern Hemisphere sequel, Moana of the South Seas. This didn’t do as well at the box office, but was well enough received by the critics to give him the reputation of being a poet of the primitive.
According to Arthur Calder-Marshall in his biography of Flaherty, The Innocent Eye, Howard Dietz of M-G-M contacted him in the summer of 1927 to ask if he’d like to work on a film of Frederick O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas. When he agreed, Dietz passed him on to Irving Thalberg, the young genius in charge of studio production. Thalberg then asked if he would co-direct the picture with Van Dyke, who was then known for turning out Westerns. The idea was that he would direct the film with Van Dyke in support. Flaherty was agreeable to that as well, but when he arrived in Hollywood, he and Laurence Stallings, the author of What Price Glory? who was engaged to work on the screenplay, tried to talk Thalberg into filming Herman Melville’s Typee instead. They thought that that would be more suitable for a film, as the O’Brien book was no more than a travelogue with an intriguing title. When they found out that Thalberg had bought the rights to the book just for the title, Stallings quit the job.
Flaherty was apparently brought into the project to provide native color. What this meant to Hunt Stromberg, the producer assigned to White Shadows, was something else. After Flaherty had given a showing of Moana, Stromberg turned to his yes-men in the theater and exclaimed, “Boys, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s fill the screen with tits!”
Part Two of Dan Mercer's thoughts on Van Dyke, Flaherty, and "White Shadows."
By studio standards, Flaherty was not a film marker. He never went into a project with a set script but only the general idea of the story he wanted to tell. He immersed himself in the people and their setting, and only then found what he wanted to say. Almost always it was different from what had sparked his imagination in the first place. As his editor on the much later Louisiana Story, Helen van Dongen, observed, he seemed to fumble forward into any new artistic creation, like a half-blind man, relying upon a guide-dog, whom nevertheless he kept calling to heel.
He could no more work with Van Dyke on this film than he was able to later with F. W. Murnau on Tabu or Alexander Korda on Elephant Boy. He has a reputation in some circles as being a documentarian. He was not that. Nanook hunted and lived in ways that had been abandoned by his people a generation before. Moana gave no suggestion that the paradise of the South Seas was already being despoiled. Flaherty was like the photographer Edward Curtis, who photographed the Plains Indians towards the end of the nineteenth century, trying to capture the essence of lives and peoples that were passing away. It was essentially a nostolgic, even romantic endeavor, but it was not amenable to the more conventional story-telling methods the studios understood.
When a full-scale company reached the Tahiti location, Flaherty realized that any naturalness on the part of the natives would be ruined by such a crowd. Early on in the shooting, with the Polyneasians singing Polyneasian songs, he came upon some cameramen and technicians sitting on the sand, listening to a portable radio broadcasting Abe Lyman and his band from the Hollywood Coconut Grove. Shortly afterwards, he resigned from the picture.
Nevertheless, White Shadows in the South Seas is a marvelous film on a tragic theme. The photography is sumptuous and Van Dyke, even then a master of montage, plays the scenes and settings like visual music. The story would be familiar to an audience which had already seen The Vanishing American, about the destruction of a native culture by forces beyond their control, brought to them by the white man. The dominance of America and the European nations then was such that they could afford the luxury of such an apology. In its sinceriety and the skill of its treatment, it was not, after all, a disservice to Flaherty’s participation.
As for Flaherty himself, he only completed six films altogether before he died in 1951, at the age of 67. It was something brought to G. W. Pabst’s attention, when he was complaining that if he had lowered his standards, he could have made more than twenty films. Yes, Flaherty had only made six films in thirty years, he said, “Yet what films!”
Daniel
Another movie I watched only once years ago. While I remember little of it, it was the sadness of the story that got to me -- a sadness you rarely, if ever, feel in studio movies today.
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