The Hurricane

John Ford – 1937 – USA

A gorgeously perfect 30s American film that embodies the style of John Ford and others of his generation who effortlessly struck a balance between artistic and commercial needs.  The Hurricane is splashy and melodramatic and also filled with extremely expressionistic flourishes that would be considered too aggressive even in a movie made today.  After marrying his village sweetheart (Dorothy Lamour), Tahitian sailor Terangi (John Hall) enjoys a one-night honeymoon and is promptly arrested the next day after decking a guy in a bar who picks a fight with him.  When he tries to escape, his sentence increases; a process that repeats several times until he’s up to 16 years.  This pleases the sadistic warden (John Carradine) and the French governor of the island (Raymond Massey).  Terangi’s plight is used to highlight the absurd injustice of applying colonial law to a non-industrialized people, especially on their own land.  As much as in his more famous westerns, Ford makes the elements an active character; serving the function of putting mankind in its place and making its squabbles and prejudices seem pathetically trivial.  The climactic and epic storm sequence, incidentally, should put to shame the legions of CG effects editors whose flimsy synthetic handiwork permeates all action movies now.  It has what all their work continues to lack; it actually looks real.