By Fred Blosser
There
are two types of people in the world, and I don’t refer to young and old, rich
and poor, or me and everybody else. The
divide I have in mind is wider and deeper. On one side are those who would rather chew broken glass than watch Hollywood’s
old costume dramas about noble knights, evil viziers, and beautiful Tahitian
princesses. On the other side are those
like me who enjoy such fare in the same way we gravitate to Mac ’n Cheese and
other comfort food. It’s a soothing
callback to our childhoods when we devoured such movies on TV and the big
screen, in less strident and less cynical times—at least, they were less
strident and less cynical if you were ten years old. In the 1940s, two of the reigning luminaries
of the genre were Maria Montez and Jon Hall, who starred together in six
Technicolor productions for Universal Pictures, 1942-45. Three of the films have been released by Kino
Lorber Studio Classics on one disc, the “Maria Montez and Jon Hall Collection.” If you haven’t had occasion to discover what
movie escapism looked like in the era before today’s Middle Earth, planet
Tatooine, and Wakanda, the Montez/Hall triple feature provides a good
introduction.
In
“White Savage” (1943) directed by Arthur Lubin from an early script by future
Academy Award winning writer-director Richard Brooks, commercial fisherman
Kaloe (Hall) wants to harvest sharks off mysterious Temple Island. Health enthusiasts will pay well for shark
liver, “a great source of Vitamin A,” he says, sounding like today’s late-nite
pitchmen for dubious dietary supplements. After a meet-cute scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a 2022 romantic
comedy, the island’s ruler, Princess Tahia (Montez), falls for the handsome
adventurer and grants him access to the waters, only to turn against him later
when she’s duped by Sam Miller (Thomas Gomez), the sleazy owner of a gambling
den in nearby Port Coral. Miller has
learned that the titular temple on Temple Island includes a golden pool inlaid
with jewels. To plunder the treasure, he
first has to get Kaloe out of the way. Given Kaloe’s name, we assume that the shark hunter is Polynesian (Hall,
born Charles Felix Locher, was said to have had a Tahitian mother in real
life), but he wears a generic charter-captain outfit and skipper’s cap, not a
sarong. Montez, born Maria Gracia Vidal in a well to do Colombian family,
doesn’t look any more Polynesian than Hall. But old movies like this are more notable for oddball charm than
authenticity. This becomes even more
apparent when you think about a golden, gem-encrusted pool in the South Seas. Where did the gold and the jewels come
from? It’s further underlined when
Kaloe, framed by Miller for murder, is imprisoned on a platform guarded below
by African lions. Why not polar
bears? Not that audiences in 1943 would have
cared, as long as dad could ogle Maria Montez in vivid Technicolor, mom could
dream about Jon Hall, and the kids could identify with third-billed Sabu as
Kaloe’s mischievous younger sidekick, Orano.
“Gypsy
Wildcat” (1944) shifts locale to medieval Europe, exactly the kind of setting
and story parodied by Rob Reiner’s beloved 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” minus
Billy Crystal and Andre the Giant. When
a traveler is murdered near the castle of ruthless Baron Tovar (Douglas
Dumbrille), Tovar imprisons a band of Gypsies camped nearby. The Gypsies harbor another stranger, Michael
(Hall), who witnessed the murder and holds an important item of evidence sought
by the baron. The caravan’s dancing
girl, Carla (Montez), an orphan who was adopted by the Gypsies at infancy,
falls in love with Michael, to the displeasure of the Gypsy chief’s son, Tonio
(Peter Coe), who had hoped to marry her. Tovar, in turn, is smitten with Carla, who looks uncannily like a woman
in an old portrait that hangs in his private quarters. Well toward the end of the movie, the
characters in the story find out why; you’ll probably put two and two together
long before then. Of the three movies on
the Blu-ray disc, “Gypsy Wildcat” may be the purest example of Universal’s
genius in recycling and repurposing its contract actors, directors, and sets
from one film to the next across different genres in its movie-factory
heyday. The director, Roy William Neill,
was borrowed from the studio’s popular Sherlock Holmes series, as were Nigel
Bruce and Gale Sondergaard. Bruce plays
Tovar’s bumbling lackey in much the same spirit as he portrayed Dr. Watson to
Basil Rathbone’s Holmes. Sondergaard,
here the wife of the Gypsy king, is better remembered as “The Spider Woman” in
Neill’s 1943 Holmes mystery of the same name. Neill and producer George Waggner were also associated with Universal’s
iconic Wolf Man horror series, and the wagons driven by the Gypsies were
probably the same ones used for Maria Ouspenskaya’s Gypsy caravan in “The Wolf
Man.” Leo Carrillo, from Universal’s
B-Westerns, plays Anube, the Gypsy chief; he, Sondergaard, Coe, and the rest of
the troupe reflect producers’ venerable tradition of choosing ethnic-looking
but non-Romani actors to play Gypsies. The script was written by James M. Cain, a surprise if you know Cain
strictly as a giant of classic noir fiction with “The Postman Always Rings
Twice” and “Double Indemnity.” However,
it isn’t so startling when you remember that Cain was one of many celebrated
novelists who made good money on the side, writing or doctoring Hollywood
scripts. I met the late James M. Cain in
passing in the early 1970s, when he was guest speaker one night at a public
library in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, near where he lived in retirement at
the time. At eighty-one, he was
formidably tall, burly, bushy-haired, and bespectacled. When he amiably chatted with members of the
audience, he answered several questions I asked about his career—none of which
dealt with “Gypsy Wildcat,” I should note.
“Sudan”
(1945), Montez’s and Hall’s final film together, is set in ancient Egypt, where
the benevolent king of Khemis is murdered. The crime appears to be the work of an elusive rebel leader, Herua, who
has eluded all attempts to catch him through the usual means. The grieving Princess Naila (Montez) has a
better (or worse) idea. She will
disguise herself as a commoner, find Herua at a fair in Sudan where he
customarily buys horses for his band, and have him arrested. Here, Sudan is a colourful whirl of dancing
girls and camels, not the grim wasteland of starving children we now see on the
TV news. Naila doesn’t realise that her
grand vizier, Horadef, who schemes to seize power, was the actual
murderer. That fact is disclosed ten
minutes into the story, although most of us will already have caught on, given
that a) grand viziers in movies like this are always secretly masterminding
palace coups, and b) Horadef is played by the great George Zucco, who filled
similar roles in Universal’s horror series about the Mummy. Horadef pays slavers to kidnap Naila when she
goes undercover. Two horse thieves,
Merat and Nebka, come to her rescue. Merat is played by Hall, and Nebka by Andy Devine. Devine provides the same nasal-voiced comedy
relief that he did in countless Westerns, only wearing robes this time instead
of suspenders. When a handsome stranger
shows up (Turhan Bey), he and Naila fall in love with each other, before the
princess discovers that the stranger is Herua. Ably written by Edmund L. Hartmann and directed by John Rawlins, the
film could almost serve as a G-rated modern sequel to “Disney’s Aladdin,” except
for a scene where Naila is branded on the arm by the slavers, and another where
she and Herua retire to his tent for a night of passion. The Egyptian sets were ported over from two
earlier Middle Eastern fantasies starring Montez and Hall, “Arabian Nights” (1942)
and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” (1944). It hardly mattered that the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Baghdad of Ali
Baba were two separate historical periods a thousand years apart, since
audiences’ apathy to such details “made little practical difference where the
story was set,” as critic Ian Cameron noted in his 1973 book, Adventure in
the Movies. 1945 was a pivotal
moment in Universal Pictures’ history as the year it dropped the Montez and
Hall series, along with its B-horror films and Sherlock Holmes pictures. When the studio returned to the genre in the
early 1950s as Universal-International, it did so with a new generation of young
contract players like Rock Hudson and Yvonne de Carlo. Montez appeared in a few more pictures and
died in 1951 at 39. Hall had a long
career of Westerns, period adventures, and TV guest appearances through the
early 1960s, including baby-boomer fame as television’s “Ramar of the Jungle” in
the ‘50s.
Although
the Montez and Hall movies ran widely on TV during the same era as “Ramar of
the Jungle,” they were broadcast in grainy black-and-white, robbing them of
their lustrous big screen Technicolor. The
Kino Lorber Blu-ray restores their original sharpness and rich palette,
supplemented by engaging audio commentary from Phillipa Berry for “White Savage”
and “Sudan,” and David Del Valle for “Gypsy Wildcat.” Theatrical trailers and subtitles for the deaf
and hearing-impaired are also included.
“Maria
Montez and Jon Hall Collection” can be ordered from Amazon HERE.
Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)