Classic movie site with rare images, original ads, and behind-the-scenes photos, with informative and insightful commentary. We like to have fun with movies!
Archive and Links
grbrpix@aol.com
Search Index Here




Monday, July 24, 2017

Where Sirens Lay In Wait For Yanks ...


Lady Of The Tropics (1939) Sets Exotic Sail

Wrote about this three years ago, admitted then that I had never seen it. That changed when TCM had a run, not HD as hoped, but OK enough for a watch. Curiosity held from a 16mm trailer I once had, overblown dialogue and kiss after kiss between Robert Taylor and Ecstasy girl Hedy Lamarr. Lady Of The Tropics is romance of playboy Bob for half-caste Hedy, us knowing from early that he'll get same stern lesson as Leslie Howard in Never The Twain Shall Meet, a title that should have been affixed anytime a Metro leading man cuddled with dusky females (an isolated time it clicked: Clark Gable and Mamo Clark in Mutiny On The Bounty). Signals are out that this romance is doomed, MGM writers schooled at preparing audiences for a weepy finish. Taylor pays dear for interbreeding, his wardrobe and immaculate grooming a first to go. A man might dream about exotics like this, but for lord's sake, don't marry one. Friends will be first to desert, then your credit is ruined. We're made to know blunder Taylor commits in letting his white girlfriend of a first reel get away. But ah, there's that ecstasy he gets from Hedy in between. Miscegenation was a big tease and good boxoffice even under the Code, so long as you knew where limits lay.


Under heading of exposition comes dialogue that natives are saddest where mixed with western Europeans, let alone Americans (by all means, leave them alone). Visiting Taylor and yacht party accept these as home truths to Saigon and ports east. Look, but never touch. Hedy Lamarr is introduced right away as possibly kept woman of Joseph Schildkraut, a character on seeming layover from earlier Von Sternberg at Paramount, his civility a thin veneer for native treachery bred to the bone. This sort of setup needed all the fairy tale telling it could get, to which Sternberg could reliably apply himself and get brilliant result (as with a Shanghai Express), but Lady Of The Tropics did not have Sternberg, so fun lessens as Taylor learns folly of not sticking with his own kind. Directing Lady Of The Tropics was Jack Conway (w/, it's said, uncredited assist from Leslie Fenton). As most at MGM was pre-cooked before directors arrived, it makes little difference who pushes traffic. A second unit donates Indochina views, here as cutaways or rear projection. 30's patronage accepted such stagecraft, even where knowing it was fake. For all that, Lady Of The Tropics shows splendidly how Hollywood could duplicate faraway time and place.


Taylor's "Bill Carey" is a walking glossary of cultural insensitivity, a "You savvy?" spoke to every shopkeeper he can't otherwise communicate with. It's a same trouble he'd have, with darker consequence, when visiting Germany in a following year's Escape, citizenry there lots less benign than ones he can roll over in Saigon. It took WWII to teach us that the world was smaller than we thought, or hoped. A Lady Of The Tropics needed authenticity of foreign-born Hedy Lamarr as native guide to Yank viewership. She would wear clothes well and sacrifice all for a Bill Carey or whoever might teach her superiority of Yank ways. She can't share our moral rectitude, however, so is doomed for it. That's where Lady Of The Tropics gets heavy. A few years later could have made a downer end less necessary, though I can't picture Lady Of The Tropics even being made past closure of the 30's. Interest in the film holds thanks largely to Lamarr, her legacy now less as actress than inventor of certain digital technology (I'm not sure just what) that we use every day. Apparently, there'd be no cell phones without Hedy, who famously said that all acting required was to "look dumb and act stupid." This woman seems to have been neither. Lady Of The Tropics is available from Warner Archive on DVD.

9 Comments:

Blogger Mike Cline said...

Hedy (NOT Hedley) now credited with inventing WiFi.

12:14 PM  
Blogger Kevin K. said...

Miscegenation? She looks whiter than me, and that's saying something.

1:50 PM  
Blogger DBenson said...

The rule of thumb used to be that non-white women were inducements to sin, regardless of whether they meant good or ill. If they meant good, they might be allowed to sacrifice themselves. Non-white men, of course, were a Fate Worse Than Death. They were either savages overwhelming some outpost of civilization, or decadent tyrants clapping their hands for the yellow-haired prize to be hauled off to the pagan equivalent of Frederick's.

The gloriously bizarro serial "The Lost City" dabbles in disapproval in miscegenation.

The hero icily spurns the quasi-Asiatic sexpot Queen Rama; the tone of the scene implies her being a slave trader is not his chief objection. A renegade white trader who lusts after her jealously ties the hero to a tree, then writes "Rama's Desire" on his chest before initiating target practice. But the trader regains his civilized perspective, and he turns against Rama.

A trollish but articulate henchman (Billy "Big Bad Wolf" Bletcher) suffers unrequited love for the heroine; near the end he confesses -- with averted eyes and genuine shame -- he used to be a black man until he was the subject of an experiment. Her sensitive reaction is "How horrible!"

4:49 PM  
Blogger John McElwee said...

Canadian Ken shares interesting observations on the career of Hedy Lamarr (Part One):


Pardon me if I ramble here. But your spotlighting of "Lady of the Tropics" has got me thinking about my own reactions to Hedy Lamarr. I wouldn't say the doomed romance genre is an automatic bull's-eye for me. I've hated plenty of them - 1970's "Love Story"'s the first title that springs to mind. But when they work for me, they tend to do so pretty strongly. "Lady of the Tropics" is one that's always hit my sweet spot. Yes, the implied "keep to your own kind" message is problematic. But that doesn't make the story any less sad. Metro's best musicals have probably survived better than their melodramas. But it's hard not to be impressed by the level of hot-house exotica,glamor and sheer technical know-how on view here, especially as it's all swirling round peak era Lamarr. After all these years, Hedy's status as fairest of them all has yet to be definitively supplanted. My own attachment to the lady follows a pattern that departs in some ways from received cultural opinion of her career. I see 1933's "Ecstasy" as something of a classic, with Lamarr, though still embryonic, subtly expressive and well-cast. Five years later, her Hollywood debut "Algiers" was a wow with the public. I think it's pretty good, but Lamarr's contribution is probably its prime asset - a stunning combination of beauty and wounded sensitivity. Sometimes an actor's unfamiliarity with English can make their line readings seem wooden. In Lamarr's case, the opposite happened. Her linguistic hesitancies seemed to heighten the impression of thoughtful vulnerability. She did "Algiers" on loan-out and came back to MGM a star. Metro is generally considered to have bungled her first two home studio vehicles ("Lady of the Tropic" and "I Take This Woman"). I take the opposite view. Both pictures not only manage to enhance her already staggering beauty, but they also discover even greater levels of tenderness in her acting. "Lady of the Tropics" and (the even better) "I Take This Woman" are women's magazine fodder raised to the level of art by the MGM team's ability to zoom in on the very singular qualities Lamarr embodied at the time. Nowadays both films are often dismissed as junk. It took a teaming with Gable, Tracy and Colbert in "Boom Town" to finally give her a big MGM hit. But, for me, this is where the lady began to emerge as commodity rather than artist. As a kind of sideline attraction in the picture, she's neither called on or perhaps even able to add any emotional weight to a vehicle that seems to take pride on its lack of same. Folderol like "Comrade X' and "Come Live With Me" may have momentarily captured the public's fancy. But they were definitely the wrong way to go in developing Hedy Lamarr artistically.

4:58 AM  
Blogger John McElwee said...

Part Two from Canadian Ken:


Oddly enough, the only other MGM film to successfully capture her sensitivity was the all-star musical "Ziegfeld Girl". But that film's full of happy surprises - including a great performance from Lana Turner of all people. Even today, commentators like to praise "H.M Pulham, Esq.". Is it its literary pedigree, its dignified detachment? I don't know. I just find it dull - and Lamarr's totally miscast. I suspect it was her disenchantment with Hollywood life and stardom that blew the light out in those beautiful eyes. But after "Ziegfeld Girl", she tended to seem a bit zombie-like onscreen, uninvolved and uninvolving. Though what actress could have possibly saved things like "Tortilla Flat" and "The Heavenly Body"? I don't know how it happened, but two years after she left Metro, in Robert Stevenson's "Dishonored Lady"(1947), the wonderful Hedy of old suddenly re-emerged. The picture had one of those pseudo-psychiatric scenarios so prevalent at the time. Yet Hedy was in wonderful form. Not just more beautiful than she'd been in years, but emanating the same kind of sensitivity she'd done so beautifully in her first three Hollywood vehicles. Sadly, reaction to the picture was negligible. And it proved to be her last first-rate performance. Not, however, her last commercial success. I love peplum spectacles. But I've never felt the pull of DeMille's "Samson and Delilah", which briefly (and spectacularly) re-ignited Lamarr's stardom as the 50's dawned. For one thing, I can never get over the early scenes of a glamorously made-up Hedy playing what all the other characters (and the audience) are supposed to accept as a hoydenish tomboy-type child. I doubt if a deglamorized and make-up free Lamarr could have pulled this off, considering the cardboard script. But certainly Wally Westmored to the hilt as she is here, Hedy's a vamp from the word go. And not a particularly interesting one. The freshness and delicacy that had hallmarked her best work is just not there. Still, on the strength of what she gave us in "Ecstasy', "Algiers", "Lady of the Tropics", "I Take This Woman", "Ziegfeld Girl" and "Dishonored Lady", I'd say Lamarr's more than earned her status as permanent screen goddess. Unparalled beauty combined more than just once with a genuine emotional resonance.
Canadian Ken

4:59 AM  
Blogger iarla said...

I like Lamarr - as a talentless, wooden beauty and a faded nostalgia piece. She was hardly more. It was enough, for me. A great inventor? Hardly - credit most go to Antheil, her co-inventor. I have read a fair bit about her, including all the recent biographies, and she is very hard to define, as a person, because, I think, she was frankly mentally unwell. You just cant rationalise 'crazy'. She is unique - human Art Deco.

11:54 AM  
Blogger Dave K said...

Put me in the camp of those thinking the lady's life away from the studio was way more interesting than her Hollywood career ... and that's not really a slam on her movies! Can't believe they haven't got around to doing a mini-series based on her life (or have they?) Like icarla, I've read a lot about her in the last decade or so. Must have been different books! After scraping away some of the hyperbole, you can still find plenty of evidence of her amazing talents. Can't pretend to fully understand the achingly detailed explanations in HEDY'S FOLLY by Richard Rhodes, but he makes a compelling case that she and George Anteheil were every bit as prescient with their frequency hopping system as now advertised. He's also pretty convincing providing biographical context to support the notion of Lamarr as full intellectual partner in this collaboration. As to being mentally unwell, well, I'm not sure that's an argument against the spark of genius.

Oh, and MY favorite Lamarr movie? I'm afraid I'd say the Bob Hope comedy MY FAVORITE SPY!

7:56 PM  
Blogger b piper said...

"Talentless,wooden beauty" was the way Hollywood saw Lamarr so she never got much chance to be anything else. The cliche is you can be beautiful or talented but you can't be both, but she could be quite good when the opportunity arose (as in the aforementioned H. M. PULHAM ESQ and Jaquies Tourneur's bizarrely titled EXPERIMENT PERILOUS, where she's damn near perfectly cast).

2:10 PM  
Blogger RichardSchilling said...

There is a new documentary (oddly) entitled "Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story", co-executive produced by Susan Sarandon. It was a hit at the recent Tribeca Film Festival here in New York and Sarandon even appeared in person to discuss the film. Unfortunately I missed it, but I read it will be on TV soon - I think PBS, as part of American Masters.

After the stardom years ended, for a glimpse of Hedy in 1957/1958, head to youtube. Hedy appeared as a guest, and then a guest panelist, on What's My Line. Both are interesting and fun to watch.

6:24 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

grbrpix@aol.com
  • December 2005
  • January 2006
  • February 2006
  • March 2006
  • April 2006
  • May 2006
  • June 2006
  • July 2006
  • August 2006
  • September 2006
  • October 2006
  • November 2006
  • December 2006
  • January 2007
  • February 2007
  • March 2007
  • April 2007
  • May 2007
  • June 2007
  • July 2007
  • August 2007
  • September 2007
  • October 2007
  • November 2007
  • December 2007
  • January 2008
  • February 2008
  • March 2008
  • April 2008
  • May 2008
  • June 2008
  • July 2008
  • August 2008
  • September 2008
  • October 2008
  • November 2008
  • December 2008
  • January 2009
  • February 2009
  • March 2009
  • April 2009
  • May 2009
  • June 2009
  • July 2009
  • August 2009
  • September 2009
  • October 2009
  • November 2009
  • December 2009
  • January 2010
  • February 2010
  • March 2010
  • April 2010
  • May 2010
  • June 2010
  • July 2010
  • August 2010
  • September 2010
  • October 2010
  • November 2010
  • December 2010
  • January 2011
  • February 2011
  • March 2011
  • April 2011
  • May 2011
  • June 2011
  • July 2011
  • August 2011
  • September 2011
  • October 2011
  • November 2011
  • December 2011
  • January 2012
  • February 2012
  • March 2012
  • April 2012
  • May 2012
  • June 2012
  • July 2012
  • August 2012
  • September 2012
  • October 2012
  • November 2012
  • December 2012
  • January 2013
  • February 2013
  • March 2013
  • April 2013
  • May 2013
  • June 2013
  • July 2013
  • August 2013
  • September 2013
  • October 2013
  • November 2013
  • December 2013
  • January 2014
  • February 2014
  • March 2014
  • April 2014
  • May 2014
  • June 2014
  • July 2014
  • August 2014
  • September 2014
  • October 2014
  • November 2014
  • December 2014
  • January 2015
  • February 2015
  • March 2015
  • April 2015
  • May 2015
  • June 2015
  • July 2015
  • August 2015
  • September 2015
  • October 2015
  • November 2015
  • December 2015
  • January 2016
  • February 2016
  • March 2016
  • April 2016
  • May 2016
  • June 2016
  • July 2016
  • August 2016
  • September 2016
  • October 2016
  • November 2016
  • December 2016
  • January 2017
  • February 2017
  • March 2017
  • April 2017
  • May 2017
  • June 2017
  • July 2017
  • August 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2017
  • November 2017
  • December 2017
  • January 2018
  • February 2018
  • March 2018
  • April 2018
  • May 2018
  • June 2018
  • July 2018
  • August 2018
  • September 2018
  • October 2018
  • November 2018
  • December 2018
  • January 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2019
  • April 2019
  • May 2019
  • June 2019
  • July 2019
  • August 2019
  • September 2019
  • October 2019
  • November 2019
  • December 2019
  • January 2020
  • February 2020
  • March 2020
  • April 2020
  • May 2020
  • June 2020
  • July 2020
  • August 2020
  • September 2020
  • October 2020
  • November 2020
  • December 2020
  • January 2021
  • February 2021
  • March 2021
  • April 2021
  • May 2021
  • June 2021
  • July 2021
  • August 2021
  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021
  • December 2021
  • January 2022
  • February 2022
  • March 2022
  • April 2022
  • May 2022
  • June 2022
  • July 2022
  • August 2022
  • September 2022
  • October 2022
  • November 2022
  • December 2022
  • January 2023
  • February 2023
  • March 2023
  • April 2023
  • May 2023
  • June 2023
  • July 2023
  • August 2023
  • September 2023
  • October 2023
  • November 2023
  • December 2023
  • January 2024
  • February 2024
  • March 2024
  • April 2024
  • May 2024
  • June 2024
  • July 2024
  • August 2024
  • September 2024
  • October 2024