REAP THE WILD WIND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 178, 20 November 1942, Page 13

REAP THE WILD WIND

(Paramount)

[N the publicity posters with this film, Ray Milland is presented as a young man in unmistakably modern dress, a fact

' which draws attention to a curious and -significant mental attitude on the part of many Hollywood producers. They want to use historical themes-in-deed, they are forced to by shortage of other material — but they’ve got the idea that the public fights shy of "costume" or "period" pictures, and so time and again their publicity goes out of its .way to cover up the powder and patches in Ahe plot. When this is impossible, they strive to give history an analogy with modern times, presenting Pitt as the equivalent of Churchill, and likening what Nelson did to the French with what we are going to do to the Germans. In spite of Mr. Milland’s up-to-date publicity wardrobe, there is nothing modern about Reap the Wild Wind. It is the same kind of film as Cecil B. De Mille has been making for the past 30 years ‘and. it ‘deviates not one whit from

his well-worn, well-tried pattern. Produced at a cost of nearly two million dollars, it has almost everything in it but the kitchen stove-and that wouldn’t have added much to the entertainment. The harvest that picture-goers will reap from the wind that blows across the treacherous Florida coastline in the year 1840 is a story about villainous wreckers (led by the deep-dyed Raymond Massey), courageous sailors and salvagers, and a tomboy heroine (Paulette Goddard) who has sweethearts (Ray Milland and John Wayne) in both groups; a succession of Simply Colossal Spectacles (all in technicolour) featuring storms, calms,. ship-wrecking, headbreaking, trial scenes (in the best modern American divorce-court manner, with everybody talking at once), stately mansions, low dives (above ground and under water), a monkey, a mulatto, and a giant octupus; and a climax (almost rivalling that in Hamlet) which leaves practically everybody in the film dead on the quarterdeck. ia Whatever else he does, Mr. De Mille certainly gives us an eyeful, but although this is his 66th attempt, I doubt if he has yet reached de millennium.