Bird of Paradise

 It should be truism that not all art requires deep meaning, profundity, or, even, plausibility.  Hollywood was once proficient in producing very effective trash, films that are superficial and politically troubling, but, nonetheless brilliantly crafted and entertaining.  King Vidor's 1932 Bird of Paradise, a torrid South Seas Island epic, is an example of a racist movie with a moronic plot that is worth seeing for the thrills that it provides.  David O. Selznick summed up the movie as requiring three scorching love scenes with Dolores del Rio and, then, a climax in which the sultry star pitches herself into a volcano as a human sacrifice.  Vidor delivers on this formula and, then, some.

A group of playboys piloting a large sailing yacht encounter South Sea islanders in an archipelago that looks much like Hawaii.  The natives wear grass skirts and a enormous volcano smokes ominously in the distance.  One of the playboys, Johnny (played by a very young and callow Joel McCrea) falls into the water with his foot entangled in a harpoon-line towed by an angry Great White Shark.  A lissome island girl, the daughter of the King, dives into the sea carrying a knife in her teeth and saves the hero.  Johnny courts the girl and escapes with her to set up householding on a nearby isle on which no one lives.  The king's henchmen return to the island when the volcano erupts and the girl, Luanna, ends up as the bride of the volcano, apparently thrown into the beast's gaping, fiery maw at the end of the movie.  

There's not much to this plot but King Vidor enlivens proceedings with all sorts of adventures and action sequences.  In the first three minutes, the yacht almost perishes on a reef when it enters the atoll -- never mind that the geology of the movie makes no sense:  is this a volcanic island or a coral atoll?  The yacht passes over sharp rocks with only "three inches to spare", the whole sequence shot in an exciting way by a camera poised right next to the swiftly moving yacht and just at sea-level.  The camera, then, tracks along a row of palm trees while hundreds of natives set to sea to greet the yacht and its crew in canoes and catamarans, a sequence shot that is thrilling on its own terms  The scenes involving Johnny's rescue by Luanna feature spectacular underwater photography.  There are wild canoe chases, frenetic dancing with natives leaping over rings of fire, and a scene in which Johnny dangles on vines over a river of molten lava.  Johnny and Luanna are captured -- Johnny gets speared and Luanna is flogged.  As they are being carried to the lip of the volcano, the yachtsmen, who have departed from the island for most of the film, make a last minute appearance, rescuing the couple by shooting down some the evil King's high priests.  Dolores del Rio spends most of the movie almost nude -- in fact, she seems to be naked in an aquatic ballet sequence in which seduces Johnny.  For half the movie, she wears a lei instead of a shirt.  (This is a pre-Code movie and quite sexually explicit -- at least, in the double entendre-laden dialogue.)  Joel McCrea has to move like Douglas Fairbanks -- he slides down a 600 foot grassy slope on his butt, climbs coconut trees with aplomb, and jumps from a towering cliff into a palm tree to quickly reach the ground in one chase scene.

The film is casually racist.  The natives are simple, sexually promiscuous children -- after one dance ,the bucks, as it were, seize the maidens, throw them over their shoulders and hustle them into their grass huts for some impulsive sex.  Aspects of the story invoke Puccini's Madame Butterfly -- it's pretty clear that prevailing social codes aren't going to allow Joel McCrea and the dusky Dolores del Rio to live together in any kind of happy ending. Indeed, in the last shots, Luanna, wearing an elaborate head-dress, but otherwise mostly naked, marches resolutely to the volcano -- a series of dissolves equates her sexuality with the erupting volcano and tom-toms sound ominously as she makes her way to her doom.  (The film similar to this movie is Murnau's much more ethnographically detailed Tabu, a celebrated picture but, in fact, hokum as well completely with scary native priests and sharks on the prowl around the picturesque atoll.)  The yachtsmen, who seem to be mostly depraved drunks, envy Johnny's relationship with the beautiful native girl and wish they had shown similar courage when they were younger.  But they fret a lot about the inter-racial love affair and one of them, clutching his pearls, says that Johnny's old mother will die of shock if her son brings home Luanna as his wife.  Someone cites Kipling about "east is east and west is west etc."  Another character, quite reasonably remarks, that "Kipling is a bunch of hooey."  The drunk says that Kipling's poem is about east and west and not "north and south" anyway.  In an affecting line of dialogue, the drunk suggests that if he had met a woman like Luanna, perhaps, he might have escaped his fate as an inebriate.  (This is wishful thinking of course.) 

It's fascinating to see Dolores del Rio at the height of her beauty -- she was about 27 when the film was made and has the idealized perfect features of a Greek statue of Aphrodite.  Orson Welles (who had an affair later with del Rio) said that this movie epitomized the "erotic ideal."  In one scene, the seriously wounded Johnny is fed by Luanna from her own lips -- she chews up mango and gently spits the pulp into his mouth.  My guess is that this sequence probably affected Orson Welles as an erotic ideal, combining sex as it does with eating (two of the great man's passions), in a way from which he never really recovered.  David Thomson has written about Dolores del Rio effectively, but there's even a hint of racism in his essay.  Providing a biographical sketch of del Rio's career, Thomson omits the series of films that the actress made in her native Mexico during and after World War II.  These pictures include the very famous film directed by Emilio Fernandez, Maria Candelaria (1943), a landmark in Mexican cinema and much-studied today because of its controversial portrait of an Indigena  (native woman) in a torrid love affair in the Xomilcho village outside Mexico City -- that is, among the ancient Aztec floating gardens, the flowers, and the canals.  Thomson lists all of Dolores del Rio's American films, including late appearances on TV, but says nothing about the important cycle of movies she made in Mexico City between 1940 and 1960.  It was at Churubusca Studios where the great cameraman Gabriel Figueroa filmed her and said that she was the most beautiful woman with the "most beautiful bone structure" (a very Mexican comment) that he had ever photographed.