White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, 1928) started a series with exotic films in which Western pioneers travelled to Polynesian islands or other far-away places. In White Shadows in the South Seas, Monte Blue starred as the traveller and Raquel Torres debuted as the beautiful island girl he falls in love with. The film was shot on Tahiti, 4000 miles from Hollywood, a rarity for the time.


German postcard. Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 110/1. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Monte Blue and Raquel Torres in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, 1928).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 110/2. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Monte Blue and Raquel Torres in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, MGM 1928).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 110/5. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Raquel Torres in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, 1928).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 110/6. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Monte Blue in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, 1928).

A masterful blend of drama and documentary

In White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, 1928), Monte Blue plays Dr. Matthew Lloyd, an alcoholic doctor who is disgusted by the way white men have cheated, robbed and exploited the trusting natives  of the Polynesian Islands. He makes an enemy of Sebastian (Robert Anderson), an evil trader, who manages to get Lloyd on to a plague-ridden boat, which, during a typhoon, is shipwrecked on another uncharted island. The Pacific island is still untouched by the 'white shadows', and Lloyd falls in love with native girl Fayaway (Raquel Torres).

When Lloyd rescues the chief's young son from drowning the island people make him a God. Enchanted by the idyllic lifestyle of the islanders, Lloyd reacts with horror when he sees Sebastian's group sail into view, bringing their usual seductive trinkets of alcohol and cigarettes. Attempting to quell the invasion, Blue is killed by one of Sebastian's men. As her island falls victim to civilisation, Fayaway mourns over her lover's grave.

In 1927, MGM production head Irving Thalberg was in the hospital recuperating and during his stay he read the travel book 'White Shadows in the South Seas' by Frederick O'Brien, who had spent a year in the South Pacific with Marquesas Islanders. Thalberg decided to make O'Brien's book into an epic adventure film and he selected  Robert Flaherty, a famed documentary maker, to direct. Thalberg had been very impressed with his documentary Moana (1926). W.S. Van Dyke, who had mainly worked on Westerns, was named as assistant director.  The film began production in 1927 as a co-venture between Flaherty, Cosmopolitan and MGM.

White Shadows in the South Seas was filmed on location in Tahiti, even though the opening credits claim it was shot on location in the Marquesas Islands with "authentic" islanders. Robert Flaherty had plenty experience with the South Seas: he had lived with his wife and children in Samoa from April 1923 to December 1924 filming Moana. He was at first given complete artistic control, but he began to falter in terms of keeping cast and crew organised.

For Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, White Shadows was a special project. It was to be MGM's first sound film, with a pre-recorded soundtrack, and the first film in which Leo, the MGM lion roared during the introduction. The soundtrack consisted of a romantic score by William Axt and David Mendoza, with a few sound effects such as wind howling, a storm, trees ruffling and one faint word "Hello".

Flaherty moved too slowly to suit MGM. More and more directorial authority was relegated to Flaherty's assistant, the phenomenally fast W. S. Van Dyke who was known as "One Take Woody", and would go on to an Oscar nomination for The Thin Man (1934). Frustrated, Flaherty resigned although some reports claim that he fell ill and was taken off the project. The film became solely the responsibility of Van Dyke.

The cinematographer was Clyde De Vinna, whose beautiful, vivid photography justly won the Oscar for Best Cinematography. There are some awesome underwater sequences, featuring octopuses, sharks, pearl-diving and an unforgettable, intimate scene in which the 'white god' teaches the island girl to whistle.

Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "Despite the wails from the pro-Flaherty camp about "compromise" and "bastardization", the finished White Shadows in the South Seas is a superlative work. Loosely based on a 1919 book by Frederick O'Brien, the film charts the denigration of the South Sea islands and its denizens thanks to the intervention of white civilization. (...)

Gorgeously photographed, White Shadows in the South Seas is a masterful blend of drama and documentary. Most surviving prints do not include the clumsily constructed talkie sequences, wherein Monte Blue teaches Raquel Torres how to whistle (this scene works far better when conveyed silently)."



French postcard for the Parisian Ciné Madeleine. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Monte Blue and Raquel Torres in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, 1928).


French postcard for the Parisian Ciné Madeleine. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Nonprofessional actors from Tahiti in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, 1928).


French postcard by Cinémagazine-Editions, no. 596. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Raquel Torres in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, 1928).

Source: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Wikipedia and IMDb.

Raquel Torres

Raquel Torres (1907-1987) was a Mexican-born American film actress. She had her breakthrough as a Polynesian beauty in White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). She played island girls, biracial beauties and was a sexy foil to the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (1933). After marrying a stockbroker in 1935, she retired.


Belgian postcard by P.I.A. Belga Phot., Bruxelles. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.


French postcard by Cinémagazine-Editions, no. 596. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Raquel Torres in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, Robert Flaherty, 1928).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 5625/1, 1930-1931. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Raquel Torres in Aloha (Albert S. Rogell, 1931).

Early Hollywood's idea of 'Latin-ness'

Raquel Torres was born Maria Guillerma Osterman in 1907 in Hermosillo to a German immigrant father and a Mexican mother. Her sister was actress Renee Torres. Her mother died while Raquel was very young and the family moved to the United States, where she spent most of her time.

Her name change, including the adoption of her mother's maiden surname, as well as speaking with a fake accent, was done to capitalise on, and conform to, early Hollywood's idea of 'Latin-ness'.

The 19-years-old Torres played a Polynesian beauty opposite Monte Blue in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, 1928), a silent film shot in Tahiti. It was MGM's first film to synchronise music, dialogue, and sound effects. She gained the role after 300 applicants were rejected. The beautifully shot film went on to win the Best Cinematography Oscar.

The next year she was third-billed behind Lily Damita and Ernest Torrence in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Charles Brabin, 1929), the first film version of the classic Thornton Wilder novel, which was a part-talkie. This Oscar winner (for Art Direction) was an early disaster movie that bonded a group of strangers who see their lives flash before their eyes while trapped on a collapsing bridge.

Torres' other film that year was The Desert Rider (Nick Grinde, 1929), a standard Western in which she provided spicy diversion opposite cowboy star Tim McCoy.


German postcard by Iris Verlag, no. 5780. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 110/5. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Raquel Torres in White Shadows in the South Seas (W.S. Van Dyke, 1928).


British postcard.

The tropical island pace

Raquel Torres continued the tropical island pace with The Sea Bat (Lionel Barrymore, Wesley Ruggles, 1930) with Charles Bickford and Boris Karloff, and Aloha (Albert S. Rogell, 1931), starring Ben Lyon. Also in 1931, she had a vaudeville act in New York. On Broadway, she played Teresa in 'Adam Had Two Sons' (1932).

The following year, she played a sexy foil to the raucous comedy teams of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey in So This Is Africa (Edward F. Cline, 1933) and the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933). It was Torres to whom Groucho delivered his classic line: "I could dance with you until the cows came home. On second thought, I'd rather dance with the cows until you came home." Duck Soup is now widely considered among critics to be a masterpiece of comedy and the Marx Brothers' finest film.

In 1934 Torres met at a Hollywood party the New York stockbroker Stephen Ames, who once was married to actress Adrienne Ames. Following her marriage to Ames in 1935, Torres abruptly retired. Her final film was the comedy Go West, Young Man (Henry Hathaway, 1936) starring Mae West, Warren William, and Randolph Scott.

Torres and her husband purchased an option on two and a half acres of land in the exclusive Los Angeles enclave of Bel-Air where they wanted to build a home. Her husband later produced postwar B-films including The Spanish Main (Frank Borzage, 1945), but she never returned to the film industry. Ames died in 1955. In 1959, Torres married actor Jon Hall, a hero of the 1930s and 1940s South Sea epics. They divorced in 1967.

In 1985, a fire in Malibu damaged her home, but the actress escaped unharmed, escorted by firefighters to safety. In 1987, Raquel Torres died of complications from an earlier stroke in Malibu, California.


Photo of a Dutch calendar, ca. 1930. We bought the pages at the VerzamelaarsJaarbeurs, The International Collectors Fair in Utrecht. The calendar had been part of the film memorabilia collection of the seller's father.


French postcard by Europe, no. 1027. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.


British postcard in the Filmshots series by Film Weekly. Photo: Radio. Bert Wheeler and Raquel Torres in So This Is Africa (Edward F. Cline, 1933).


Dutch postcard by Croese & Bosman, no. 536. Photo: Columbia Film. Sent by mail in 1934.

Sources: Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.