The Hurricane, 1937

We're going to get married

Jon Hall (as Terangi) and Dorothy Lamour (as Marama) are in love and looking forward to a happy life together on their home island of Manukura, but they're soon to be victimized by colonial power (in the form of Raymond Massey as a by-the-book governor over another island where Terangi gets in trouble for punching a white man) and what follows are eight years of undeserved punishment and imprisonment, interspersed with Terangi's desperate attempts to get free and go home. It will take Governor DeLaage (Massey) growing up a little, a lot of unnecessary injustice and a gigantic special-effect laden hurricane to set things right (right? Well, at least set things better. The film starts with Thomas Mitchell - - as Dr. Kersaint - - passing Manukura on a cruise ship and weeping a little as he gazes out at the place. Why is he weeping and smiling? That's what the next 105 minutes shows us.)

The South Pacific as both a paradise and a tricky place is the story in John Ford's 1937 The Hurricane, just released on Bluray, and Amazon.com would be glad to sell you a copy. (The high-definition isn't perfect, and restoration looks incomplete, if it was done at all, but it is the best looking version of the film I have yet seen for home video.)

What's Recent