Review of Donovan's Reef (1963) by Edith N — 19 Jun 2008

I have seen this movie so many times that it doesn't really matter that I'm not really watching it. I'd say it's technically a Christmas movie--certainly it's set in December--but I never think of it as one, hence its appearance here in June. Indeed, the movie starts on 7 December, the birthday of Donovan (John Wayne) and Gilhooley (Lee Marvin). Indeed, they mention that they've been fighting on that day for 22 years. Given that the movie was made in 1963, this means they've been fighting every 7 December since Pearl Harbor Day.

Michael Patrik "Guns" Donovan runs a bar on the French Polynesian island of Haleakaloa with Cesar Romero as the governor. At the beginning of the film, his friend Doc Dedham (Jack Warden) goes off to the smaller islands to provide medical care for the natives of those places. While he is gone, his daughter, Amelia (Elizabeth Allen), comes from Boston to find out if her father, who is due to inherit quite a wallop of the shipping business their family owns, is of sound moral character. Suspecting that it's something along those lines, the three men--Donovan, Gilhooley, and Romero's Marquis Andre de Large--come to an arrangement to conceal the existence of Dedham's three children with the late ancestral princess of the island, Manulani.

I think it's about equal parts fear of Amelia's possible racism and the men's determination not to be the one to explain it to her that causes this particular situation. After all, Donovan gets irate when Dedham's wife is referred to in conversation as "some native woman." And that's part of a conversation about how Miss Dedham could well see her. He knows that Andre doesn't mean it that way. However, his love and respect for the woman overpower his knowledge. He also loves the three children that he pretends are his.

This would be Wayne's last movie with John Ford, though Ford would live another ten years and Wayne another fifteen. It is greatly unlike most of their work together, with the exception of [i]The Quiet Man[/i]. Wayne is playing a romantic lead, which he does not pull off terribly well in either film. However, in this film, he is supposed to be gruff and a bit unpleasant. Miss Dedham is stiff and a bit unpleasant. Gilhooley is drunk and [i]very[/i] unpleasant. The only truly shining lights, characterwise, of the movie are Father Cluzeot (Marcel Dalio) and the children. The oldest, Lelani (Jacqueline Malouf), is a beautiful, dignified girl who wants nothing more than to greet her sister with all due courtesy and who hates that, were she white, she would be allowed to. Sally (Cherylene Lee) and Luki (Tim Stafford) are precocious and adorable, if a hair on the obnoxious side themselves.

John Wayne made 171 movies. I've seen perhaps two or three dozen of them; I have liked less than a third of those. However, this is one that I [i]own[/i], not for any nostalgic sense, as I own (and do not watch) [i]Angel and the Badman[/i], my mother's favourite. I genuinely love this film. I'm in a bit of a rush this morning, but I don't have to watch the movie to know every detail of it except for some of the Polynesian words.