On the evidence of Carol Reed's 1951 Outcast of the Islands, Joseph Conrad's novella is an early draft for his later, more famous The Heart of Darkness -- there is a remote trading outpost, a river leading into the jungle, a White man who has gone "native", and a sinister tribal seductress who has cast her enchantment over the protagonist. Needless to say, these elements, allegorical aspects defining the colonialist enterprise, make for a "ripping yarn," as it was once said, and Reed's film adaptation of Conrad's early narrative is wonderfully compelling. The movie is a little confused after its masterful middle section and seems to presume that viewers know the story in broad terms at least. The film's florid ending, replete with Shakespearian-sounding imprecations and invective, is a bit unmotivated -- obviously, something is going on to which we are not fully privy. I don't know if this defect arises from Conrad's source material, which I have not read, or the way in which the movie is made -- on screen, it feels like the picture is missing about ten minutes of vital exposition, although the attentive viewer can work out generally what has happened. Despite these reservations, the film is superb, brilliantly edited, and highly memorable. It's the last in the series of four films for which Carol Reed is famous: Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949). Critics sometimes argue that Outcast of the Islands marks the beginnings of Reed's decline and, indeed, the film seems somehow compromised. It's also argued that Reed was only as good as his collaborators -- Odd Man Out with James Mason and Graham Greene as scenarist on The Third Man and The Fallen Idol. This may be unfair to Reed since Outcast of the Islands, although a bit muddled in its last fifteen minutes (it's 100 minutes long) contains many passages that are brilliantly realized.
In Singapore, a reprobate named Willem has embezzled money from the shipping firm by which he has been employed. Willem, played spectacularly by Trevor Howard, is s self-satisfied, crooked man-about-town -- we first see him playing billiards when he should be working. Willem is married, but, when accusations as to his embezzlement become pressing, he abandons his supposedly loving wife in a heartbeat -- both of them exchange vicious recriminations and it's obvious that their marriage has been some kind of wretched sham. An old sea captain named Lingard (Ralph Richardson) has sailed into harbor bearing a cargo of tin and rubber -- he has access to native wealth from a hidden trading post somewhere in the Malaysian archipelago. Lingard rescued Willem when the was a street-boy in the gutter many years previous, a feral orphan it seems, and raised him as the sea captain's protegee, before the young man sought work as a freight agent in Singapore. Willem senses that Lingard will save him again if presented with the proper circumstances and so he feigns a suicide attempt. Lingard, after fishing him out of the drink, is predictably generous and takes Willem with him on a sea-voyage to the island where he maintains his hidden trading post. The village from which Lingard's wealth originates is upriver in the jungle, an exotic-looking hamlet of thatched huts built on stilts over a steamy-looking lagoon. The village is inaccessible except for a brutal hike through the jungle, but, with skill, can be reached by sailing through a bay beset with deadly cliffs and submerged reefs -- only a very experienced sailor with great daring can pilot a ship through these hazards. Lingard, who trusts Willem, shows him how to manage the transit. At the village, Lingard loads his ship with more tin and rubber. The villagers are ruled by a blind chief, formerly a vicious pirate, but now more or less helpless. His factotum, Babalatchi (played in dark-face by a Anglo-Greek actor -- it's like Sam Jaffe's role in Gunga Din) is a villainous, if highly articulate conniver: he wants to oust the Brits from the concession and sell the local resources to an Arab trader, Allagapan, a sinister figure who looks a bit like Sidney Greenstreet and who wears a fez as a sign of his iniquity. The trading post is operated by the unctuous Robert Morley who is married to Lingard's wife (played by Wendy Hiller). Morley has a homely, if precocious daughter, on whom he dotes. (This is Nina, who plays an important role in, at least, one other work by Conrad, Almayer's Folly -- Morley is Almayer; Nina, who is mixed race in Conrad's stories, here is a 100% Caucasian.) As soon as Lingard departs, leaving Willem to learn the business from Almayer, there's trouble. Lingard becomes obsessed with the blind chieftain's daughter, Aiessa, a young woman said to be very brave, who has fought side-by-side with her pirate father, and who is reputed to be mercilessly cruel. Almayer's frustrated wife falls in love with Willem but is thwarted by the man's obsession with Aiessa. Willem plots with Babalatchi to sell the trading concession to the Arab Allagapan -- and, in this endeavor, Babalatchi uses Aiessa as his cat's paw. Ultimately, there's an uprising and Almayer is sewn into a hammock and, then, swung in his canvas cocoon over a raging bonfire while the natives mock him. Willem teaches Allagapan how to reach the concession in the village by schooner, thus, destroying Lingard's commercial advantage. This is the point where there's a sudden rift in the narrative. Without any real explanation, we see Almayer, a bit the worse for wear, explaining to Lingard how he was betrayed by Willem and how Allagapan has been granted sea-access to the village. Almayer says that Willem has gone native and is now hiding with the remnants of the chieftain's clan (the old pirate has died) upriver. Lingard goes upriver to confront Willem who is now hiding like a cowboy in an American Western amidst some spectacular rock formations overlooking the river. Aiessa seems prepared to kill Lingard but inexplicably relents. Lingard climbs up the rock to his inevitable duel with Willem, the man whom he raised as his son. But, upon facing Willem, Lingard realizes that the man has been destroyed by his own greed and lust. He's helpless and not even worth killing. Lingard goes back to his canoe in a thunderous monsoon downpour. In the last scenes, we see Willem in despair at being an "outcast of the island" and Aiessa horrified that she is trapped with a pathetic and feckless coward.
The narrative is subtle with many intricacies and the acting is all excellent. The dialogue is rife with aphorisms and memorable speeches, many of them with an Elizabethan flavor. (T. S. Eliot quotes from Outcast of the Islands in his "The Hollow Men.") The village of Sambir is exquisitely realized, a weird suspended labyrinth of catwalks and platforms that can be lit to provide spectacular effects of film noir chiaroscuro -- this is particularly evident in the sequence in which Willem pursues Aiessa in the watery maze beneath the huts on their wooden stilts. Moonlight falls through the wicker and rattan and there are amazing effects similar to what one might find in a film by Von Sternberg. (The sequence is shot in velvety day-for-night black and white.) Reed builds sequences on elaborate matching eye-line shots -- everyone is gazing surreptitiously at everyone else and we read emotions from the ways in which people gaze at one another. In some scenes, Reed intercuts between three or four parallel tracks of action: at one point, Almayer's wife is gazing with desire at Willem; Willem has eyes only for Aiessa who is swimming around in the lagoon; Almayer is surveying the action from his bungalow across the river; and a feral child (a 'river boy' as he is called), a naked apparition in a tiny canoe is pursuing Willem through the watery labyrinth of the village. (The naked little boy seems like some spectral version of the young Willem when he was rescued years earlier by Lingard). Bare-naked children are constantly diving into the lagoon. When Lingard's schooner appears at the village, the people set forth to greet him in canoes, about half of which seem to sink. There are native curses deployed against Willem and some astonishing set-pieces, including a nightmarish birthday party involving Almayer that degenerates into florid threats and invective. The scenes involving the passage of the dangerous rock defile leading to the village are cut quickly after the manner of Soviet cinema. The film has some technical defects -- some of the matte work and rear-projection is unconvincing and distracting. Aiessa, who never speaks, is played as an Asian femme fatale (the movie's connection to film noir is quite obvious -- The Third Man, of course, is a classic example of the genre) by an exotic-looking French actress, named Karima, proclaimed (inaccurately) to be half French and half Algerian or, in some press releases, as entirely Algerian. (She was completely French, born in Toulouse). Her Mediterranean features don't match the appearance of the rest of the villagers who all seem to be Chinese or Malaysian. The movie is pictorially impressive, despite these deficits, and the intricate editing gives the viewer the sense of fully exploring the exotic environs where the film is shot. No doubt, there are racist aspects to this depiction of imperialist/colonialist trade -- but Conrad was a shrewd critic of the Empire and he anticipates criticisms that might be levied against him. The film is extremely ambitious and, I think, mostly a masterpiece.
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