"Hurricane" Film Libels

the French and Misrep resents the British

I WENT to see the film “Hurricane”, which is a Hollywood dramatisation of the excellent novel by our Tahiti friends, Charles B. Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. The film is a winner, mainly because of the genius of Samuel Goldwyn’s producers in depicting a

Pacific island in a hurricane. The hurri cane scenes are amazing: I know some thing of studio tricks, but I could not imagine how much of this was accom plished.

Some of the things in this presenta tion are idiotic, however. One sees, for example, the local governor dining every evening in a heavy black dinner-suit, with a shining, stiff board “front”—and, apparently, there is not a dewdrop upon his beetling brow!

And the fight with the shark—that is

priceless. The producer has read somewhere that South Seas natives sometimes dive deep under a shark, come at him from beneath, and swiftly and suddenly rip open his belly with a sharp knife. So our hero does something of the sort. But this super-man doesn’t sneak upon his shark—no, he attacks it face to face, wrestles furiously with

it for several minutes and finally, with arm and leg hooked over the gentle crea ture’s back, he leans down sideways and cuts open its stomach. It’s quite ob viously and necessarily a fake with a dead fish; and it is also one of the silliest things that have ever been on the films, Still, the audience loved it.

But the reason why I came away

cursing “Hurricane” had nothing to do with the whimsicalities of producers.

I charge Mr. Goldwyn with giving to the millions of people who will see this film an entirely wrong conception of the prison system in Tahiti, and of the nation responsible for the prison sys tem. In this film, one is shown in scenes reminiscent of Siberia under the Czar, incredibly brutal overseers flogging lines of toiling and moaning prisoners, and methods of administering justice so hor rible and callous that I could hear the people in the audience around me growl ing and muttering. That is a gross libel upon the French administration in Tahiti—nothing like this possibly could exist—nor has it existed.

But the thing has a worse angle than that. Not one person in one hundred knows that Tahiti is a French colony; and practically nothing is done by the producer to make that point clear.

Ninety-nine out of every hundred per sons will come away from that enter tainment in the belief that they have been witnessing a system controlled by the British Colonial Service. All the scenes are British in presentation and character. The whole of the dialogue is in English, of course: the Tahitian gov ernor, to whom a vain appeal for mercy is made, replies in a marked Oxford accent, after the supposed manner of the English official in the tropics. Once or twice, one sees a Tricolour fluttering; there is one vague reference to “Cay enne Prison”; but, otherwise, the pic ture is 100 per cent. British. There are a few obviously faked pictures of Papeete, but not a French word or name among them. The fact is, apparently, that none of this film was “shot” in Tahiti—otherwise, there must have been some local atmosphere.

“Hurricane”, as it stands, is an in excusable libel upon the French admin istration in Tahiti, and upon the Brit ish Colonial Service generally; and some action ought to be taken to show money chasing, fact-perverting producers of films that they cannot thus make their playthings at the expense of the good reputation of institutions whose honour, otherwise, is jealously guarded.

Fairy stories have been a legitimate entertainment since the beginning of mankind. But fairy tales which delib erately, for the sake of gain, give the masses a completely wrong idea of im portant governmental institutions, do not go into the category of entertain

ment.-

R. W. Robson.