Donovan's Reef

Another movie that shows up a lot on one or another of Pluto TV's movie channels -- I think Paramount Classic or whatever that channel is called -- is the John Wayne movie Donovan's Reef. I'd never seen it before, so recently when it was on I once again used Pluto's option to start the movie from the beginning in order that I could finally do a review of it here.

Somewhere in French Polynesia, a sailing ship is plying its trade among several of the islands. Nearby is the island of Haleakaloha, where one of the passengers, Gilhooley (Lee Marvin), is hoping to get off. That's because he wants to see his old friend, Donovan (John Wayne), who lives on the island and runs a dive bar. But the boat wasn't planning to stop there, so Gilhooley starts a fight to be able to jump ship and swim to the island. Shows you what type of person Gilhooley is. And Donovan isn't much different.

After about 20 minutes of their monkeyshines, the action suddenly shifts to Boston. That's the headquarters of the Dedham Shipping Company, a venerable company founded in 1763 that has somehow survived for 200 years. The company is tightly held within the family, mostly old spinster/widow aunt types, although there's a young lady among them, Amelia Dedham (Elizabeth Allen). She's technically not an orphan, although she's never seen her father, who fought in the South Pacific in World War II and never returned to Boston after the war. One of the old shareholders in the company has just died, bequeathing a bunch of shares to Amelia's father. The rest of the family doesn't want this, so they send Amelia out to the South Pacific not to punish her, but for her to get information on her father that would let the rest of the family assert he's violated a morals clause in the will and thereby forfeit all those shares.

Amelia is hoping to get to the island without the islanders -- especially her father -- knowing who she is at first. Dad (Jack Warden), it turns out, served in the medical corps in the Navy during the war, and when he found out that his wife (and Amelia's mother) had died, he decided that the people of Haleakaloha and the neighboring islands needed a doctor like him far more than Boston did, and that Amelia was in better hands with her Boston family than with him. So he stayed behind on the island. Of course, we don't learn all of this at first.

Now, when Amelia gets to the island, Dad is one one of his tours of the outlying islands, giving whatever medical care he can to the residents of those islands. On the island, he had remarried and fathered three more children, Amelia's half-siblings, but because he's away at the time Donovan takes it upon himself to suggest that he's the widowed father of those kids. It's clear that he and Amelia are going to become closer, although it's going to be a difficult road to get there. Meanwhile, the French colonial governor of the island, the Marquis de Lage (Cesar Romero), wouldn't mind starting a relationship with her.

Donovan's Reef is in some ways an amiable movie, of the sort that doesn't really have the plot you might think, but is instead more about the relationships between the characters and everybody's story of personal growth as Amelia learns more about this island of seeming racial harmony while Donovan and his friends finally mature a bit. Once you get past the fact that the plot is a bit thin in the telling, it's not exactly a bad movie. The other issue, however, is that this is directed by John Ford, and his movies with John Wayne, and their friendship over the years, have a decided reptuation. If you've ever seen the TCM Word of Mouth piece that Maureen O'Hara did about having to take a drunk John Wayne to his club on John Ford's orders, you'll know what I'm talking about. And the movie has that attitude in spades. If that's not your thing, you might have some issues with Donovan's Reef.

Overall, however, Donovan's Reef is a fine little movie with lovely location shooting in Hawaii that's definitely worth a watch.