White Shadows in the South Seas

A couple of days back I did a post on the John Gilbert film His Glorious Night, mentioning the transition from silent films to sound. One thing I don't think I mentioned in that post is how in the lead-up to fully talking films, there was a period in which some silent films, starting with Don Juan over at Warner Bros., didn't have dialog but did have synchronized scores and sound effects. An example of this over at MGM was White Shadows in the South Seas.

The movie was filmed almost entirely on location, which was a big deal for a movie of that era. As we saw in a movie like His Majesty O'Keefe that I did a post on some months back, the peoples of the Pacific Islands lived off the land -- or, well, off the sea -- until the arrival of Europeans who saw the resources as something to be exploited for use back home; in this case that resource is pearls as a valuable jewel. Dr. Lloyd (Monte Blue) is a doctor who ministers to both the Europeans and the locals, and has seen how the locals have not been able to adapt to the introduction of European civilization, with the result that "western" diseases are rampant among the Polynesian population.

This alarms Dr. Lloyd, but even more alarming to his is the fact that his fellow white Europeans just don't seem to care. All they want is those pearls, and they can't bother to give a fair price for the pearls regardless of what the harvesting does to the bodies of the divers who have to get the pearls from the oysters at the bottom of the Pacific. Dr. Lloyd protests to Sebastian (Robert Anderson), one of the traders, but to no avail. Well, worse, there is some avail, but it's in the opposite direction as Sebastian and the other traders decide they have to rid themselves of a meddlesome presence like Dr. Lloyd.

So to that end, they tell him there's a quarantine ship that needs a doctor and get him aboard. Except that this is a lie, and they tie Dr. Lloyd up on the boat and send it adrift, presumably to his death. Soon enough a storm comes up, and like the Minnow on Gilligan's Island, the ship breaks up and runs around on an isolated island, nearly killing poor Dr. Lloyd. The experience doesn't kill him, and it turns out that this is an inhabited island, albeit one that no white man prior to Dr. Lloyd has ever set foot on. They bring him back to their village for him to recover.

Not only does Dr. Lloyd recover, he takes to the Polynesian culture fairly well since he was predisposed to have it in for European ways from his time among the corrupt pearl traders. And he falls in love with Fayaway (Raquel Torres), one of the native girls. He's also able to ingratiate himself with the islanders when he's able to save a young boy who nearly drowns with more advanced western medical techniques. Eventually, however, other whites approach the island. Dr. Lloyd realizes this can only mean trouble, but the islanders don't see this and don't heed Dr. Lloyd's warnings....

Apparently White Shadows in the South Seas was conceived in part by Robert Flaherty, who had done Nanook of the North among other docudrama-style pictures. That was his intention for this movie, as well. But, the film was being funded by MGM, which was ironically much more focused on getting the movie done on budget than Flaherty would have been. So the western aspect of the story was enhanced and direction was given to W.S. Van Dyke. The resulting product is one that looks pretty thanks to the location shooting, but with a fairly conventional story. Not that Flaherty's "documentary" style would have been that much better.