Very few of the people reviewing this film seem to properly take into account how early it is. They talk blithely about "silent films set in the South Seas" although they would be hard put to find another of this date. If they have a long list of "South Sea" films made in or around 1914, perhaps they would like to post it somewhere because they evidently know something I do not know.
Although in its existing print it has evidently been re-edited for its 1922 re-release, it is basically a film of 1914 - made that is to say before D. W. Griffith had made any full-length film except the dire Home Sweet Home and the indifferent Judith of Bethulia. This film also compares favourably with D. W. Griffith's own perfectly dreadful South Seas films of 1920 (The Idol Dancer and The Love Flower). Stylistically it is for that matter more sophisticated than The Birth of a Nation.
So, while it is true that this film contains all the typical elements of LATER South Seas films (particularly in fact the cult-horror films of the fifties) although not really the "paradisal" elements (which only come in after Flahert'y 1926 Moana), it is actually in the process not of copying those clichés (except in so far as thy exist as literary tropes) but of crating them.
Its principal weakness not in the acting or the direction which are as good as anything produced in the US at this date - one can find many much better European films in 1914 - except perhaps Tourneur's The Wishing Ring (it does not compare unfavourably, for instance, with the original version of The Squaw Man or any of the surviving DeMille films of 1914) but in the writing, which is rather trashy. Here Carey would have been wise to take a leaf out of Hobart Bosworth's book and seek out strong scripts with a certain literary quality (alas his Martin Eden of this year only seems to survive in an incomplete copy). Otherwise the two men (Carey and Bosworth) are rather equivalent in their style and approach.
