Malaya

Just by chance I was home to catch this terrific movie when it was shown a few days ago on cable TV...what a happy surprise! Both Stewart and Tracy play "good-bad guys" whose inner morality and patriotism rises to the top when the going gets tough. The supporting cast is full of top talent, including super performances from John Hodiak, Sidney Greenstreet, and Lionel Barrymore. Richard Loo and Gilbert Roland both play brilliantly to their "type" and are fine as well, and Roland Winters (usually in pompous comic roles) is very effective as a German rubber plantation owner who should not be trusted! Look for the always-welcome Russel Hicks in the scene on the train, and savor the sound of his elegant voice.

In addition, the script by Frank Fenton is way above average, with very droll and off-hand wit in evidence throughout.

All in all, a first-rate movie which deserves to be much better known!

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.

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 (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.

Spencer Tracy and James Stewart preside over a terrific cast in "Malaya," a 1949 film also starring Valentina Cortese, Sydney Greenstreet, John Hodiak, Lionel Barrymore, Roland Winters and Gilbert Roland.

This is a fictional account of a very real situation involving the shortage of rubber during World War II. Japan really dominated the countries that had the rubber, and there was smuggling of rubber to the U.S. The situation involving Tracy and Stewart, however, never happened.

Tracy plays a con named Carnahan, whom the government releases from Alcatraz in order to spearhead this project, and Stewart plays John Royer, a former reporter with a shady enough past that the government (represented by John Hodiak) thinks he's a good bet to go into Malaya and smuggle tons of rubber out of that country and pay with gold. Carnahan knows the country like the back of his hand and has the connections. He and Royer pose as Irish sailors looking for work in order to get around a suspicious Colonel Tomura (Richard Loo) while they are helped by an old friend of Carnahan's, The Dutchman (Sydney Greenstreet). Cortese has the Dietrich role, that of a singer in love with Carnahan.

There are some exciting scenes in this film, and it holds one's attention. One of the best performances comes from Gilbert Roland, who leads the smugglers handpicked by The Dutchmen. He's very convincing.

As for Tracy and Stewart, well, although Tracy started out in tough guy Wallace Beery roles, 1949 was a little late for him to be taking them up again. Actually Hodiak would have been good, or Bogart, or John Wayne, Jimmy Cagney, someone along those lines. I thought Stewart was very good and that the two of them made an effective team. Someone said he came off as a nice guy. I thought he did cynic and hardboiled well. You can be cynical and hardboiled and averse to physical violence.

All in all, pretty good.