Luana la vergine sacra

This lusty pre-code movie has a boatload of rich Americans cruising the South Seas. They land on a volcanic island, where they discover that native Dolores Del Rio is scheduled to be sacrificed to the volcano god. However, she and Joel McCrea fall in love and go off to live together in bliss... for a while.

It's a movie I don't revisit that often. This time I was struck that director King Vidor directed long sections of it as a silent movie. There's a prologue and epilogue, but until more than fifty minutes elapse before McCrea and Miss Del Rio hold a conversation. Instead, we are treated to an underwater sequence in which they are both naked, and stunningly shot images, courtesy of cameraman Clyde De Vinna.

In place of dialogue, Vidor allows Max Steiner's lush score to carry the burden of story and dialogue, and it does so magnificently. Some commenters on the IMDb claim this is the first feature movie with a full score. That honor appears to belong to 1931's CIMMARON, also with a Steiner score. It would, I suppose, be neater to believe that this movie allowed the movie score to enter already in full bloom, carrying the movie to success in story telling, cinema, and the audiences. Alas, it performed poorly in the theaters in a year when not much was performing well. Today, more than 90 years later, it seems a bit naive, a bit racist, and thoroughly old-fashioned. Still, there's a tremendous amount of cinematic beauty in the movie, the images, and in the physical beauty of its leads.