Malaya

There is a scene that makes the whole picture worthwhile (although it is otherwise pretty ordinary):

Sydney GREENSTREET is entering a room after app. 2/3 of the movie, where Spencery Tracey has just been "treated kindly" in an "interview", Greenstreet is sweating (as always), sitting down and looking at the molestor of Tracy, then says (roughly): "If you say this was necessary, then of course it was necessary, but wasn't that much for a bottle of poor booze?". The officer say: "But he broke our rules". Greenstreet: "A man who drinks and then doesn't break any rules is no man. Drinking and making troubles goes together, this is also a rule." What a line !! Officer: "I love your logic." Of course these are not exactly the lines from the picture, cause I saw the German dubbed version and re-translated them, but they can only be better in the English version.

Hilarious! Tape it, when shown on TV next time and get to that scene, it is just great!

Malaya (1949)

It would be nice to love this movie—with a strong theme of wartime ingenuity and bravery, and with three stellar actors—but by the end I was thinking everyone involved was just going through the motions. That's probably enough in many ways with people this naturally gifted on screen, and the movie is enjoyable, no question. With all the borrowings or references to earlier classics (Sydney Greenstreet even has a big bird as a pet, as in "Casablanca"), it makes for a fun time.

The premise starts with some very compact storytelling—a somewhat disreputable man (James Stewart) is overheard saying he could smuggle rubber out of British Malaya (now Malaysia). It's WWII and the Army likes the idea enough to send him off with an ex-con (Spencer Tracy) who knows the area well. (This is all arranged with the help of Lionel Barrymore in a small role.)

Then the adventure begins as they penetrate with surprising ease the rubber plantations and arrange with the generally friendly locals and ex-pats to get their hidden stockpiles. The Japanese do eventually catch on and there is fun there, but not before a couple of torch songs and some humorous excess as usual from the likable Greenstreet.

Frankly, things never get exciting or even suspenseful, though interesting all along. One huge problem (for me) was a complete lack of details. The two men would say, okay, let's go get this rubber here, and they meet the plantation owner and there is some talk and then suddenly they are going down the river with some little barges. The Japanese have no suspicions, and the local smugglers are all these cheerful Resistance Fighter types who really like to help a lot.

It would be fun to know if a young viewer finds this exotic and fun or laughable. It's somewhere between in all. And what honestly holds it together for anyone who likes the actors is just watching familiar faces in new roles. That is one of the endless interests of the movies.

See it? Sure, if you already like older films or WWII films. It's not bad. The director Richard Thorpe is quite unknown these days, but the cinematographer is a standard bearer of he period, George Folsey, and that makes every scenes look terrific. Yeah, it's not at all bad. But it ain't great, either.

This film has some really great actors in it - Sydney Greenstreet, Spencer Tracey, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Gilbert Roland, John Hodiak, Richard Loo, etc. And it's got an exotic location (Malaya) and a war-time plot (getting rubber to outfit the US war machine in WW2). But it never manages to get going, maybe because Spencer Tracey was never really an "action" star, or maybe because the director Richard Thorpe, while prolific, wasn't particularly skilled in this genre (he's best known for Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table, The Great Caruso, The Student Prince).

It's worth a look, and Barrymore and Greenstreet do their usual wonderful jobs.

Malaya may seem a fantastic tale, but the story actually has quite a bit of truth to it. When World War II broke out the Japanese quickly conquered most of the rubber producing areas of the world. The modern mechanized army does run on rubber and both the USA and Germany developed types of synthetic rubber to be used.

My mother told me during World War II there were all kinds of drives for recyclable material and among the most valuable was rubber. People contributed all kinds of old tires for the war effort.

Lionel Barrymore plays the real life Manchester Boddy who was publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News who was the prime mover in the scheme you see portrayed here in Malaya. Though this story is fictional, the need for rubber in the USA was critical at the time and there was in fact a rubber smuggling operation going on.

Spencer Tracy before he came to MGM played just the kind of two fisted action heroes at Fox which was his original studio. He expressed an interest in doing this kind of film for old time sake and got cast in it. He really isn't poaching on Humphrey Bogart's territory these were the kind of roles he originally did in film while Bogey was playing hoods over at Warner Brothers.

Because the script called for a buddy team of heroes, James Stewart was approached and he even conceded top billing to Tracy. According to the Films of James Stewart, he admired Tracy as an actor so much that he was grateful just for the opportunity to work with him again. In fact Stewart's first film role was in Murder Man, a film that starred Spencer Tracy back in 1935.

With the two of these big stars in the leads, MGM was able to recruit a really outstanding group of players like John Hodiak, Valentina Cortese, Roland Winters, Richard Loo, the aforementioned Lionel Barrymore and my two favorites Gilbert Roland and Sydney Greenstreet.

Roland was shortchanged though. Watching Malaya I could tell his role as Tracy's adventurous friend was left on the cutting room floor. But even a little Gilbert Roland is always a pleasure to watch.

This was Sydney Greenstreet's last film and in it he essentially reprises the part of Ferrari in Casablanca. He's got the best lines in the film and his scenes with his cockatoo are classic. As he says, he's just a saloon keeper with an access to gossip. Which gets put to very good use.

Stewart the idealist, Tracy the cynical realist. Too bad they didn't work together more.

This is a good, not great, action-adventure picture based on the true account of how very necessary rubber was gotten out of Malaya, under the nose of the Japanese, for the Allied war effort in World War Two.

Spencer Tracy and James Stewart are teamed as a two-fisted con (sprung from Alcatraz for the job) and a hard-bitten reporter recruited by American intelligence (represented by John Hodiak).

There's some action, some atmosphere, some romance. It's not an exciting film, really, but the premise is unusual enough, and with some effort on my part, I stayed with it, and felt it had a decent payoff.

Like a lot of other MGM films of the time, the entire foreign locale was recreated on the back lot and the sound stages of the studio. You may recognize the river area and other locations from earlier films (Tarzan films, for example).

I'm not sure I bought Tracy as the tough nut, Carnahan. At least, not at his age. (He did sometimes play these kinds of roles much earlier in his career.) Here, I would rather have seen Clark Gable. The lines, the attitudes would have suited him better.

Jimmy Stewart doesn't really seem ideally cast, either. He's very good, but he's not exactly right.

Sydney Greenstreet, Valentina Cortesa, Gilbert Roland, Richard Loo and Lionel Barrymore round out the cast.

Though not a thrill a minute, Malaya is at least a fairly intelligent picture that tells a little known story of WWII heroism.