Film Review: Reap the Wild Wind (1942)
Cecil B. DeMille is considered to be one of the founding fathers of Hollywood and one of the most iconic personalities in its entire history. His reputation was built during a very long and prolific career, during which he directed many epic or “larger-than-life” films that proved to be immensely in tune with the audience, providing commercial success that had eluded his more celebrated and critically acclaimed colleagues. One such success was the 1942 period adventure Reap the Wild Wind.
The film is based on the eponymous novel by Thelma Strabel. The plot is set in 1840s Florida, at a time when sailing ships provided most of the commerce and transport between the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico coast. Those ships had to pass through the treacherous waters of the Florida Keys, which provided excellent business opportunities to locals willing to take part in marine salvage. The protagonist is Loxi Clairborne (played by Paulette Goddard), a young woman who inherited the salvage business from her late father. Her main competitor is King Cutler (played by Raymond Massey), whose crews always seem to be ahead of hers, and Loxi and everyone else suspect that he has been deliberately wrecking ships. When a sailing ship, Jubilee, is wrecked, Cutler makes off with the salvaged cargo, while Loxi rescues Jack Stuart (played by John Wayne), the ship’s captain with whom she falls in love. Jack dreams of commanding Southern Cross, a new steamship that is the pride of his employer’s fleet. The wreckage of Jubilee makes this unlikely, but Loxi travels to Charleston, where she would try to plead his case with the management of the shipping company, which includes the lawyer Steve Tolliver (played by Ray Milland). Tolliver falls in love with Loxi, which would create serious complications when he comes to the Florida Keys to confront Cutler. Tolliver and Stuart would soon develop a bitter rivalry over Loxi, leading to spectacular and tragic consequences.
Released shortly after the United States' entry into the Second World War, Reap the Wild Wind was a prime example of Classic Hollywood’s ability to deliver escapist entertainment, although a few lines of dialogue about America’s need to protect its waterways from nefarious characters served the current war propaganda well. For DeMille, it was his second film made fully in colour, and it could be argued that he tried to show that he could deliver his own version of Gone with the Wind. There are some similarities and connections between the two films. Both are set in the antebellum South, and DeMille used a large budget to lovingly reconstruct the period (including location shots in Charleston, where local authorities temporarily removed all telephone poles, power lines, and modern fire hydrants from the streets to make the locations look exactly as they did a century ago). In both films, the protagonist is a strong, independent woman who nevertheless is torn in her romantic feelings towards two very different men. Paulette Goddard and Susan Hayward, who played Loxi’s cousin Drusilla, were both trying to land the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, and both actresses, in their roles as Southern belles, try to compete with Vivien Leigh’s performance.
Comparisons between the two films, however, show that DeMille delivered something very different. With only two hours of running time, Reap the Wild Wind is more compact and less epic, although in this case, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The comparison between Leigh and Goddard is clearly in favour of the former, while the script has certain issues with the characterisations of the two main male characters. Tolliver, played by Ray Milland, looks like a Southern gentleman but for the most part behaves like a bully and a stalker, and viewers with today’s “politically correct” sentiments would be revolted by the scene in which the heroine receives a spanking and other sorts of physical mistreatment at his hands. The impression is only saved by John Wayne, who plays Stuart as a very complex character, someone who begins as a traditional hero only to gradually reveal his dark side before achieving moral redemption near the end. The rest of the cast is also very good, including young Robert Preston and the dependable character actor Raymond Massey as the Cutler brothers. Reap the Wild Wind also features very good cinematography by Victor Milner and William Skall, as well as an effective musical soundtrack by Vic Young. But the most attractive element of the film is the Oscar-winning special effects which, together with some fine underwater photography, deliver an exciting and memorable scene featuring a wrecked ship and a giant squid near the end. Although some of today’s viewers might see this film as somewhat melodramatic at times, it can still be enjoyed not only as the work of a great director but as a great display of Hollywood’s craftsmanship from its golden age.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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