Last of the Pagans

Last of the Pagans features some quite stunning black and white photography by Clyde De Vinna and a paper thin story designed to please those who like travelogues with a touch of romance. Shot on location in Tahiti, the film is a lightweight take on the Robert Flaherty oeuvre, with numerous tips of the hat to the great documentarist's features, especially his 1926 South Seas epic Moana. Mala--an Alaskan native discovered by director W.S. Van Dyke during production of the similar Eskimo (1933)--plays Taro, the male chauvinist pig who steals beautiful Lotus Long from her native village and claims her as his own. Last of the Pagans is a relentless parade of cultural imperialism and cliches about primitive peoples and noble savages, but it looks absolutely gorgeous. You're best advised to turn the sound down, ignore the subtitles, and soak up De Vinna's superb camera work.

Wonderful island romance! Shot on location in Tahiti this deals with a village where handsome hunky Taro (Mala) falls in love with beautiful Lilleo (Lotus Long). He eventually wins her over but an evil ugly and powerful member of the village wants her for himself.

Shot in beautiful black and white this is a corny but charming little movie. It throws in every cliché you can think of (including a climatic hurricane) but it works! The scenery is beautiful and the two leads are certainly attractive with great bodies. Silly but sweet. Recommended.

I love how this film shows white people as the villains they were in cultures like this - plying natives with alcohol and baubles, and then enslaving them. And this is not slavery like what Hollywood showed us four years later in Gone with the Wind, where the slaves are just happy as hell to be under massa's loving care and protection, this is slavery where the slaves inhale toxic dust, endure backbreaking labor, and keel over from heat stroke. Whatever you say about how Polynesian culture is simplified, it gets the gist of this right, and that's pretty fantastic for 1935. These scenes were damning enough that France had them excised, and Nazi Germany banned the film entirely.

I also loved seeing Lotus Long and Ray Mala again. Yes, they're not Polynesians, yes, she was born in New Jersey, blah blah blah and give me a break. I think it's wonderful to see the diversity, and Long in particular puts a lot of spunk into the role in addition to having such unappreciated screen presence. The film is full of beautiful people, beautiful scenery (I believe shot in Tahiti), and beautiful dancing. Are we seeing an accurate, nuanced appreciation of the culture? No, we are not, and the central characters are too simple even in the translation of whatever language they're speaking, which gives off the stench of condescension, but it's not onerous. I wasn't thrilled to see Long's character fall for Mala's after the wife raiding (bear with the film if you're as turned off as I was early on), but later we see how she's enslaved in another way, which was interesting, and her face really says it all. I liked how the characters are caught up in a love triangle and then later desperate to be reunited, which has a universality and humanism about it, though the ending turns out to be awfully convenient.

It's not a great film or even a very good one, but it has its moments and you can definitely do worse. As a bit of a side note, contrary to what you might read, the film has zero to do with Melville's (very good) novel Typee. As Kevin J. Hayes put it in 'Herman Melville in Context', this was "a marketing strategy which reduces the author's name to the function of signifying 'literature' as part of the total entertainment package offered by these films." It's unfortunate this marketing campaign is then quoted on the Wiki page for the film, and then regurgitated in various reviews.

I recently had the opportunity of viewing this film. It is in black and white and was made quite some time back, but is well worth seeing.

Concerning French Polynesia, much of the dialogue is non-English, and the translations are a bit scarce; but not needed much--the actions of the characters and what happens to them tells the story quite adequately.

The native men from one island go to another island to steal wives for themselves. The main male character, Taro, kidnaps a woman he especially fancies. She is very unhappy about this--and I fully expected him to drag her back to his island and immediately start raping her, but that is not how it happens. Instead, once he gets there, he courts her-and she begins to become quite taken with his charms.

However, there are white men looking for labor for their mines, and the chief in Taro's village is also taken with the woman Taro wants. You can be sure these things come to plenty of troubles for both Taro and his intended.

This film was quite different from any I have ever seen before. It was excellently done and well told and I would certainly recommend it.

This is one of those Romances of the South Seas that MGM liked to offer its patrons every year or so. This one is based on Herman Melville's TYPEE, which I was spared in college and never got around to reading on my own.

I'll take a moment to speculate that the reason Melville was so adaptable to the movies was that at the heart of his boring, obsessively-detailed novels, there was always a good adventure yarn. Screenwriter John Farrow has whittled this one down to a Rousseau-style Romance of the Noble Savage. The Polynesian lovers are played by Mala, who was an Inuit, and Lotus Long, who hailed from exotic Atlantic City. Richard Thorpe, beginning his long career for Metro, got good performances out of the leads, who speak in what I guess is a Polynesian language, extensively subtitled. They undergo courtship, traders who kidnap Mala to work in a collapsing guano mine, and a big storm. Will true love be denied? While the screenplay is hobbled by the Production Code, the photography is superlative, shot by location specialist Clyde de Vinna. If you can turn your ears off, you'll see a fine little silent film here, with some spectacular views.