Reap the Wild Wind

Raymond Massey and John Wayne

Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind is a Technicolor action romance set in Key West in 1840. Sometimes dismissed as hokum, I found it to be a fairly rousing epic, at least for the first two thirds. The opener is one of DeMille's best as Paulette Goddard spies a ship wreck, ditches her hoop skirt for breeches, and proceeds to rescue the ship's captain played by John Wayne. Soon, Goddard is in a love triangle with Wayne, the man of action, and maritime lawyer Ray Milland, a more rational being. Each has a mascot or pet that represents the character in caricature. Wayne has a pet monkey named Bananas who is all raging id. Milland's pet is a lapdog named Romulus representing domesticated fido fidelity. Milland had top billing, so guess who gets the girl?

The film is set amidst the nascent US shipping industry, particularly its salvage fleet, as it shifts to steam power. The primary villain of the film, the most cutthroat of the salvagers who instigates the film's skullduggery, is played by a perfectly cast Raymond Massey. Robert Preston plays Massey's brother. He is effective as is Susan Hayward who plays his lover in the film's secondary romance. From the very first shot, a bald eagle figurehead on a ship's prow, DeMille invests his material with colorful splashes of early Americana. As Remington provided a model for the look of John Ford's Westerns, N.C. Wyeth provides one, particularly in his illustrations and paintings of pirates, for DeMille to duplicate here. Whenever a dash of red is needed to provide tonal balance or variety, voila a parrot appears. Reap the Wild Wind is always interesting to look at even when certain aspects of it have dated, like its racial typing and its giant rubber squid. However, the backdrop effects, mostly matte paintings and rear projection, are still impressive and attractive.

DeMille liked to research the look of the eras in his films, and it pays off to great effect in Reap the Wild Wind's ball sequence, but he was no more a realist than Ford. As the critical taste for realism increased after World War 2, DeMille and Ford's reputations both declined a bit. In Reap the Wild Wind, based on a Saturday Evening Post story which was then rewritten by a host of scribes, DeMille attempted to craft an American legend to gird his country for the coming conflict. In the trailer for the film, narrated by the director himself, the need for the safety of American sea lanes is pointedly trumpeted. Since the passage of the Lend-Lease bill, America, officially neutral, had seen its merchant marine fleet under attack by German U-boats in the Atlantic. By the time of the film's release in 1942, America was officially at war. 

Another influence on Reap the Wild Wind was the success of Gone With The Wind. The rapport between Paulette Goddard and Louise Beavers tries too hard to mimic the one between Vivian Leigh and Hattie McDaniel in the earlier picture. Instead of fiddle-dee-dee, Goddard gets to intone "fiddlesticks". Goddard was once thought to be one of the favorites for the role of Scarlett O'Hara and Reap the Wild Wind gives a sense of what might have been. Her southern accent is shaky, but Goddard plays a feisty hunk magnet with elan. Wayne is stolidly dependable and Milland quite good as a character that is labeled at one point a "namby-pamby". Charles Bickford is wonderful as a grizzled whaler, but disappears after a single sequence. Similarly, Oscar Polk, who was a servant in Gone With The Wind, has an effective cameo as "Salt Meat". Hedda Hopper is well cast as a biddy perpetually on the verge of a faint. It may be patriotic hokum, but Reap the Wild Wind is also engrossing cinema that still feels more vital than most modern fare.