Outcast of the Islands

This exciting film is well-worth watching. It is visually rich, and the acting is consistently surprising, even from such known quantities as George Coulouris and Wilfred Hyde-White. Trevor Howard shows great emotional flexibility, a quality we don't necessarily associate with him, and Robert Morley twinkles a good deal less than usual. Whether Sir Ralph Richardson looks good throwing a punch is something you'll have to decide for yourself.

However, the camera falls in love with picturesque young boys diving into water, which delays, over-ornaments and distracts from Conrad's austere story-telling.

More importantly, two of the female characters, Mrs. Almayer and Mrs. Willems, are turned from native women into transplanted Englishwomen, leaving Aissa the only native girl involved.

This has the effect of turning the movie into a tract on the horrors of miscegenation, when Conrad's novel is clearly focused on Peter Willems' double betrayal of Tom Lingard. Willems' taking up with a native woman is treated by the film as unique, instead of the usual thing in these climes. It is shown as embodying Willems' personal moral decline, which the book would regard as nonsense.

So if you can find the film, by all means watch it and enjoy its many virtues, but the movie has less to do with one of the great novels then it pretends to.

P.S. TCM now has this film in its library!

Carol Reed's "An Outcast Of The Islands" is generally conceded to be the finest film ever made of Joseph Conrad's tales. To be fair "Nostromo", "Under Western Eyes", and "Chance" never have been filmed. Hitchcock's "Sabotage" (based on "The Secret Agent") is a good Hitchcock film, but the story is modernized and changed. The later film version of the novel was politely received and then forgotten. "Victory" was made into a serviceable love and adventure story with Fredric March and Cedric Hardwicke, but the irony and allegory of the story was lost. "Lord Jim" was better recalled for the severe drubbing critics gave it - concluding with a Mad Magazine spoof called "Lord Jump". There is "Apocalypse Now" which is a fine attempt at "Heart of Darkness", but it changes the site of the story from the Belgium Congo of Leopold II to Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. "An Outcast" stuck to the basic story of Willems and his betrayal of Almayer and Captain Lingard for a beautiful native girl. Trevor Howard gave many memorable, delicate performances in his life (best, perhaps, for "Brief Encounter"), but this performance as a man who was poor enough material to begin with but goes to seed is possibly better. The supporting cast is great, with Robert Morley playing his most despicable character, and Ralph Richardson as the decent Lingard. George Coulouris is properly Machiavellian as the sly Babalatchi, and Wendy Hiller is tragic as that human dishrag Mrs. Almayer. The only problem a purist may have is that Willems is killed at the end of the novel accidentally (and quite memorably). Not so in the film. But his punishment of living as a monument to failure and hopelessness may be even more fitting - I leave to the reader/viewer.

When the Marlon Brando version of Mutiny On The Bounty came out one of the scenes I remember is Trevor Howard remonstrating with Brando after finding him getting ready to get down to business with Tarita about controlling his lust. Captain Bligh would have had little use for the character that Howard plays in Outcast Of The Island where his lust truly gets the better of him.

Those tropical islands have always had a certain allure to us westerners, but this movie based on a Joseph Conrad novel clearly demonstrates the problem of having too much of a good thing. Howard's been in the area for years and he's indulged all the readily available vices too much for too long. When he's caught stealing it might be the end for him.

But an old friend trading captain Ralph Richardson takes pity on him and takes him from Singapore to a small island where his son-in-law Robert Morley lives with wife Wendy Hiller and real life daughter Annabel Morley. Richardson deposits him there, not that Morley truly wants him.

It doesn't take long for Howard to start stirring things up and all of his schemes and machinations involve a bad case overwhelming lust for the beautiful Kerima. She certainly is something to lust over. In the end she brings about his total ruination.

The central character among the Occidentals is Howard, but Richardson and Morley aren't any model specimens either. Richardson's main concern is keeping a monopoly of the trade there. The harbor is inaccessible for the most part, but Richardson knows a narrow navigable passageway through the reefs so he monopolizes the trade. And he's pretty ruthless about keeping his monopoly.

As for Morley he's one uptight businessman. The prior relationship between Richardson and Morley is taken up in a previous Conrad novel and sad to say if you haven't read that book, a lot of it will elude the viewer.

Hiller is good, but sadly wasted in a role of a woman trapped in a bad situation. She's got an unrequited yen for Howard, but she's still a faithful wife, just like Jean Arthur in Shane.

Outcast Of The Island is a most atypical South Seas story. Conrad's vision is not fully realized by the film, but the players all do a fine job with what they are given.

British drama based on a book by Joseph Conrad. Trevor Howard stars as middle manager in a Far East shipping company. When he's found to have been embezzling, he's virtually exiled and runs of with his old friend, ship captain Ralph Richardson. Ralph takes him to a remote island paradise and instructs Trevor to learn the ways of their trading business with local overseer Robert Morley. However, Howard slowly succumbs to his worst impulses in the never-ending heat and boredom of island life.

I really wanted to like this one more than I did. The direction from Carol Reed is good, although things drag in a few places. The cinematography is very good; one of the camera operators was Freddie Francis. Guy Hamilton also worked as the assistant director. My chief problem with the film was the Howard character. I haven't read the source novel, and perhaps it provided more of the inner voice of the character, but as he stands in the film, he's completely unlikable, and not in a compelling or entertaining way. He's just a boring, self-centered jerk.

The natives are presented in a less-than-flattering light as well, which is exacerbated by having one of them be George Coulouris in dark body paint. I've also never been fond of Robert Morley. He's an irritating ham and he's unpleasant to even look at. That's terrible to say, I suppose, but in a visual medium, it's a valid point. His real-life daughter played his on-screen daughter here, and she's just as annoying.

Although he made a handful of worthwhile films before them and won a competitive Oscar much later, Carol Reed is still most admired for his immediate post-WWII work: ODD MAN OUT (1947), THE FALLEN IDOL (1948), THE THIRD MAN (1949) – all of them BAFTA winners – and the movie under review. The latter is the least-seen and least-regarded of the lot (perhaps because there are very few sympathetic characters in it!) but emerges a remarkable achievement nevertheless, with the director's sure hand more than evident in several striking sequences throughout. It features a great cast, all of whom deliver splendid performances: Trevor Howard (second-billed but clearly the protagonist here), Ralph Richardson, Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller, George Coulouris (as an English-speaking native!), Wilfrid Hyde-White and Frederick Valk.

While the Far East atmosphere is undeniably vivid and captivating (and John Wilcox's cinematography suitably gleaming), this never draws attention away from the complex character study at the center of Joseph Conrad's typically sea-based and compelling plot line (which works its way up to an abrupt yet memorable ending) about a rogue trader driven mad by lust for a native girl (the silent Kerima) and delusions of grandeur a' la Kurtz in the same author's "Heart Of Darkness". For the record, OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS was also a BAFTA nominee, was apparently shorn of 8 minutes for U.S. TV screenings and is featured in cult American film-maker Monte Hellman's All-Time Top 10 list, apart from being championed by eminent movie critics like Pauline Kael and David Thomson!