Maru Maru (1952)

Salvage diver Gregory Mason (Errol Flynn) is living and working in the Philippines with his behind the scenes work partner and friend Andy Callahan (Richard Webb). Or really, former friend, for Mason’s exclusively commerce-driven (or really, money-grubbing) agenda with a ruthless streak fathoms deep seems to have put so much pressure on Callahan, he has fled into the life of a binge drinker. The friendship is certainly not strengthened by the fact that Callahan’s wife Stella (Ruth Roman) is a former girlfriend of Mason’s and clearly still has feelings for him, because we all know that hateful glowers in 50s movies always mean romantic and sexual passion, and she’s quite the glowerer. Though she also tends to defend Callahan against Mason. There’s really only one good point on Mason’s books at the beginning of the movie: that he’s basically adopted his “house boy” Manuelo (Robert Cabal) as well as Manuelo’s little brother, treating the kids rather more fatherly than you’d expect from the guy, or a white colonialist boss towards brown people.

Still, it is not a complete surprise that Mason is the police’s main suspect when Callahan is suddenly murdered. We the audience know he’s innocent though. Mason is the kind of bastard who still does have some things he won’t do, even for money.

For as it turns out, there’s a lot of money connected to Callahan’s death in form of a treasure sunk during the war. Various people shady (Raymond Burr in his patented screen heavy stage projecting an impressive amount of sleazy punchability) and not so shady (Georges Renavent) are interested in that treasure, obviously, and so will be Mason.

While most people who think about the director at all will connect him with great Westerns and the best US giant monster movie (perhaps of all time, most certainly the 1950s), Them!, Gordon Douglas was the kind of classic journeyman filmmaker who made all kinds of film in all kinds of genres, typically doing them very well indeed.

Sometimes, as in the case of Maru Maru, he even made films that collected all kinds of genres in a single movie. This is a colonialist diving adventure movie, mixed with quite a bit of noir, melodrama, and thriller tropes, culminating in a redemption with not very subtle religious overtones (which, on purpose or not, really fits the Filipino setting very well). It’s also a film made by a filmmaker who had no problems whatsoever to take all the bits and pieces of diverse genre tropes and make a coherent – sometimes exciting, usually at least interesting – movie out of them. As is only logical, Douglas does this by focussing on the overlaps between the genres he’s using here, finding the character types they share and letting them interact in a sensible manner, leading the audience through the plot via Flynn’s redemption arc.

Visually, there’s a lot of noir on screen here, so the Philippines become a place drenched in more shadow than light, populated (as is traditional in colonialist adventure and to me always suggesting a silent admittance to the hypocrisy of colonialist betterment rhetoric) by people who are haunted by mistakes, greedy for money and generally shady or at least morally ambiguous, quite independent of their skin colour. Douglas’s treatment of his non-white (who are mostly even played by actors of colour, if not always the exact right one) characters is better than you get in most of these films, at least in so much as he treats them as like everyone else on screen – characters that stop being complete genre tropes because director and script bother with giving them enough dimension to let them breathe like people.

Three Films Make A Post: The Best Loved Bandit Of All Time!

On the Rocks (2020): This is another one of those films where I seem to have seen a very different movie than most other people. After comparisons with classic screwball comedies, praises for its New York-ness and with Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in front of the camera and Sofia Coppola behind it, I was pumped for a bit of light yet fun entertainment. What I actually got was a rich people’s problems film where poor people only exist as waiters, waitresses and drivers to serve as a background for some of the least interesting marital and daddy issues imaginable. Most of the film may take place in New York, but it’s certainly no part of New York anyone but the upper class twats inhabiting it would ever want to see. It’s all just very dull to look at, and that dullness runs through most of the film – it’s slow, the emotional stakes for this viewer are very low, and when it comes to light charm, humour and hidden depths, you won’t want to throw out your Nora Ephron movies.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938): So let’s get back eight decades into the past to find something more lively. Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood version of elements of British folklore is of course one of the best swashbucklers every made, and a film that still plays rather wonderfully. Sure, as always, there are elements very much of its time especially when it comes to characterisation, and I’m always flabbergasted by the Richard the Lionheart love (a guy who clearly didn’t give a crap about the country he was supposed to rule, what with him always gallivanting off to a crusade or two, or finding other business to be away on), but otherwise, this is a flawless movie, from Errol Flynn’s ability to play a smug bastard but still make him charming and likeable, over the eye-popping colour palette, to an astonishing amount of clever and playful little touches and ideas in the script. There’s never a dull moment here, that’s for sure.

The Green Room aka La chambre verte (1978): I have to admit that I’ve never been a particular admirer of Henry James, not even of his visits in the realms of the supernatural and the borderline weird, but the man’s body of work certainly has resulted in quite a few great movies. Case in point is this one, where François Truffaut mixes James’s story “The Altar of the Dead” with elements of a couple of other short stories that apparently connected with the director’s own haunted thoughts about the people in his life he lost. The result is an emotionally and intellectually complex meditation on what we owe the dead, how the memory of the dead can dramatically overshadow the ability to live life itself.

So it is very much a ghost story, though one without any ghosts but the ones the protagonist, as well played by Truffaut in his last stint as an actor, creates through his inability to let go of the love as well as his grudges against the dead. I don’t really want to pretend it’s a horror film in anything but the broadest sense, yet it does at the very least tell of a haunted man and incorporates some finely wrought gothic imagery. Beside being brilliant.

In short: Northern Pursuit (1943)

After an overcomplicated set-up for it all in a first act that never seems to even want to end, Mountie Steve Wagner (Errol Flynn) attempts to go undercover with – Bavarian, going by the predominant accents - Nazis who have some sort of dastardly plan in the Northern wilds of Canada. Alas, the Nazis – specifically their especially evil leader Hugo von Keller (Helmut Dantine) - don’t believe the way too convenient series of betrayals our hero and his bosses have created to lure them, and secure his cooperation in getting them through the wilderness alive by taking his fiancé Laura McBain (Julie Bishop) hostage. But he’s still played by Errol Flynn, so…

Apparently, William Faulkner did some uncredited writing work on this one, even if it is rather hard to imagine and even more difficult to notice. Going by what ended up on screen, the film must have gone through the 40s version of production hell, leading to a sometimes painfully uneven script whose first act set-ups feel strained and contrived and will become completely unnecessary rather sooner than later anyway.

The film markedly improves once Flynn and the comic book Nazis (this is not a complaint) get together in the great white north, director Raoul Walsh creating tensions between the various grades of evil of the Nazis and their helpers, the way they use a couple of First Nation people whose male part actually believes the lovers of Aryan purity will treat his people better than the Canadians do (who were, don’t get me wrong, treating his people horribly indeed), and Wagner’s attempts at somehow thwarting the Nazis while protecting - pleasantly plucky – Laura’s life. And kudos to a film from ‘43 for at least hinting at the possibility someone might collaborate with the Nazis because he’s treated badly by their enemies.

Walsh, while clearly, not working at his full powers of imagination but very much in hired hand mode, does still create some nice action set-pieces in the final act, with a genuinely dangerous looking ski chase and some climactic business in an airplane alone worth the price of entry. Flynn’s charming and manly without being macho, the Nazis are evil, the character actors do their stuff – there’s really very little to complain here beyond the bad spy movie first act, if you take the film for what it is.