Macao

After the debacle of His Kind of Woman (1951), RKO producer Howard Hughes lost interest in exploiting the on-screen chemistry between Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.  His Kind of Woman was over-budget, too long, and inadequately profitable.  Hughes had Joseph von Sternberg, the great director of films such as The Blue Angel and The Scarlet Empress, under contract for two pictures and so he cast Mitchum and Russell in a low-budget sub-B picture about criminals and gamblers in Macao, commissioned a largely incoherent script, and ordered von Sternberg to direct the film.  Von Sternberg's poetic style, moonbeams refracted through the shadow of Moorish filigree, clashed with the exuberant, cartoonish sexuality that the two leads projected and, apparently, the shoot was contentious and chaotic.  Von Sternberg had no facility for directing action (it is said that his greatest interest was showing wisps of shadow and light moving across a beautiful woman's face) and he botched the film's climactic fistfight.  Nick Ray was recruited to re-shoot the fisticuffs and other elements of the film that Hughes disliked.  Unfortunately, the film starred Gloria Graham in a secondary part -- Graham was Ray's wife at the time but they were involved in nasty court proceedings at the time:  Ray had caught his wife in bed with his 13 year old son, Tony.  (Tony Ray and Gloria Graham actually were married briefly during the early sixties.)  One can imagine the fireworks that this created between the alcoholic Ray and his equally alcoholic soon-to-be divorced wife. 

In some ways Macao (1952) is a reprise of His Kind of Women, featuring a good cast playing grifters and hoodlums in an exotic resort.  But whereas His Kind of Woman was long, Wagnerian in its aspirations, and wildly violent, Macao turned out to be understated, even vaguely listless, a short 80 minutes, and not particularly violent.  Both films feature yachts piloted by rich criminals, a motif for the yacht-loving Hughes at that time in his life.  In each film, there is an attempt to recreate the "lightning in a bottle" ambience of Michael Curtiz' Casablanca.  The film's are set in warm climates and everyone sweats profusely -- there are expressionistic sets meant to supply an exotic atmosphere on a low budget and the leading lady sings a couple songs to the raffish hoodlums gathered around her:  "all the usual suspects" are hanging around the gambling den and saloon.  In Macao, a pianist who looks like Diego Rivera, fat with bulging eyes and a limp, is called Gimpy and he tickles the ivories for effect -- he's like Sam in Casablanca. (The set for the gambling hell, two-tiered with people using baskets to fish collateral for gambling debts out of the lower level, is similar to more atmospheric set von Sternberg contrived The Shanghai Gesture in 1941). The film's plot has something to do with diamond smuggling although I didn't exactly follow the twists and turns in the story.  A bad guy is holed-up in Macao, running a gambler hell with his moll played by Gloria Graham.  Mitchum, a petty criminal on the lam, has trouble at customs -- in a shipboard encounter Jane Russell, playing a jaded adventuress and courtesan, has picked his pocket, taken the dough from his wallet, and cavalierly thrown wallet and ID into the sea.  The gangster, through a comically corrupt cop, gets Mitchum through customs and plans to use him as a mule to smuggle contraband (diamonds, I think) to Hong Kong.  The heavy-set William Bendix appears as another smuggler -- he's trafficking in nylon stockings (which gives Russell a chance to show off her below-the-waist assets) and, also, obscurely involved in the intrigue.  Bendix turns out to be a cop also sent to Macao undercover to lure the bad guy outside of the three-mile limit so he can be extradited to the U.S.  The gangster employs a couple of Chinese thugs skilled with throwing knives and they have already murdered a cop previously sent on this mission.  Mitchum woos Russell and they go on a sampan tour of the harbor in the moonlight.  This kind of scene is the sort of thing where von Sternberg could work his magic, but the budget was too low and the film doesn't even attempt a day-for-night ambience:  Russell and Mitchum are shot against unconvincing rear-projections of the daylight Hong Kong harbor.  Nonetheless, the chemistry between the two stars is real and they do manage a significant erotic charge in some of their scenes together.  Von Sternberg's talents are on display in only a couple of scenes:  there is a labyrinthine harbor set that is all floating flat-bedded boats, shadowy wharves, black water luminous with Hollywood light and everything draped in a dense,  picturesque spider-web of netting.  The set is like school-yard jungle gym -- it's got lots of opportunities for climbing and walking on narrow planks.  The whole thing is bathtub-sized and so the pursuit that von Sternberg stages in this little tangled landscape of bobbing boats, black water, obscure-looking pylons and shadowy wharves is convincingly nightmarish -- it's like one of those dreams in which you run and run and seem to get nowhere:  the set is so small that you have the sense of the characters spinning in circles as they hack their way through the dense, picturesque webbing of hanging nets.  In the end, one of the Chinese henchmen throws a knife that spears William Bendix (dressed in white suit and panama hat that is identical to Mitchum's get-up).  Bendix croaks out a few words exculpating Mitchum form minor crimes committed in New York and, then, dies.  The bad guy is readily seduced by Jane Russell to travel on his yacht too far out to sea.  The ending is anti-climactic with an imperfectly fierce fist-fight.  The cops catch the bad guy and Mitchum laconically notes that their undercover agent didn't make it, resulting in a comically nonchalant response from the police on their yacht.  You can't say that this movie is any good, although I know efforts have been made to rehabilitate it -- by any objective standard, the film is cheap and pretty wretched.  But it's oddly entertaining, moves along at good clip, and you get to see Jane Russell in her full glamor-girl regalia singing Harold Arlen's song,"Make it one for my baby (and one for the road").  There's also a nicely expressionistic stone stairway filmed from above that looks like something from a Max Reinhardt production, a nice solid if roughhewn set that stands in vivid contrast to the cardboard and shadows of the rest of the film.