One of John Ford's best films of the 1930s -- and certainly the best of the so-called "disaster" spectacles in mid-decade.Unlike those epics, it's not just a trite build-up to a big climax. As fashioned by Ford and writer Dudley Nichols (after the Nordoff & Hall novel), The Hurricane is a passionate narrative of wronged humanity, with strong outrage against European colonialism in the South Seas. In this case the brute force of the French penal system awakens an intense, vindictive doggedness in the defiant hero, Terangi (Jon Hall), not dissimilar to Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.Ford uses his strong visual sense, heavily influenced by German Expressionism, to give a torturous, altogether grim picture of Terangi's ordeals as a convict. French Governor Raymond Massey and prison warden John Carradine, each with exceptional sternness and malice, invoke the harsh brutality of the Law. The European sense of superiority overrides any natural compassion for fellow humans.It is up to a sincere Mary Astor and a wonderfully irascible Thomas Mitchell to advocate a more benevolent European attitude.When the hurricane comes, it strikes with relentless fury, crashing, pounding, smashing up things, sweeping away islanders in a still breathtaking 14 minutes of screen time. The backlot staging, Oscar-winning sound design, montage editing and process shots (some a little too ambitious for the time ) still impress the techno-savvy 21st century viewer. A constantly ringing church bell - as if a plea for divine mercy - works to striking effect. Executed by effects supervisor James Basevi and A.D. Stuart Heisler, it's a terrific accomplishment, rendering The Hurricane superior to disaster films as San Francisco and In Old Chicago.In the larger framework, nobody seems ill at ease with native rituals and customs, possibly from the long association of writers Nordoff and Hall with the South Seas, Ford's own love of the islands, and Jon Hall's lineage as part Tahitian himself (his mother was Tahitian-born); albeit defined by the larger attitudes of the period, the conception of spirited islanders struggling against European domination seems genuinely achieved.

Many believe tonight's director John Ford was one of the best. He's the only director ever to win four Academy Awards. John Ford directed over 160 films, he learned his craft starting in silent photoplays making westerns and moving smoothly into sound films of nearly every genre. Ford won his first Best Director Oscar for THE INFORMER an Irish drama in 1935. That same year he also made THE WHOLE TOWN'S TALKING an Edward G. Robinson gangster comedy and STEAMBOAT ROUND THE BEND a Will Rogers comedy. In 1936 Ford made the powerful THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND a Civil War era drama. Later in 1939 Ford started hitting them out of the park directing such classic must-see-films as STAGECOACH, YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, in 1940 THE GRAPES OF WRATH, and in 1941 HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, and later others. Just before making HURRICANE Ford directed Shirley Temple in WEE WILLIE WINKIE a family adventure film. The screenwriter for tonight's film was Ford's favorite, Dudley Nichols who had collaborated with him on 16 titles. Uncredited was Ben Hecht known as the script doctor who producer Sam Goldwyn brought in.As for the cast Jerome Cowan as Captain Nagle using John Ford's own yacht in the film, Cowan you may recognize from THE MALTESE FALCON as Bogart's partner that gets killed in the beginning.John Carradine a master at evil characters plays Warden. My favorite performance of his is as the preacher in GRAPES OF WRATH. Thomas Mitchell who plays the Doctor was Scarlett's father in GONE WITH THE WIND was Oscar nominated for tonight's film and won the Academy Award for STAGECOACH playing a drunk doctor.C. Aubrey Smith that great English character actor with the giant nose plays the priest Father Paul.Mary Astor another silent film star most famous today for being the femme fetal in THE MALTESE FALCON and the same year as THE HURRICANE appeared as the woman everybody's fighting over in THE PRISONER OF ZENDA. Astor plays the wife of Governor Raymond Massey.Raymond Massey was also in THE PRISONER OF ZENDA. Just a year before Massey made the Sci-Fi classic THINGS TO COME and three years later would be Oscar nominated as the lead in ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS.Finally I have worked my way thru our ensemble to our young leads, both early in their career.Handsome, athletic leading man Jon Hall was the son of an actor and a real life Tahitian princess. In fact his uncle co wrote the book that tonight's film is based on. As you may have read in the slide show he changed his name twice before becoming Jon Hall and it took tonight's film HURRICANE for him to become a star, but it also type cast him in adventure films for the rest of his career.Dorothy Lamour's road to fame started when she was named Miss New Orleans in 1931, Dorothy Lamour worked as a Chicago elevator operator; band vocalist for her first husband, band leader Herbie Kaye; and radio performer. In 1936 she donned her soon-to-be-famous sarong for her debut at Paramount, THE JUNGLE PRINCESS, and continued to play female Tarzan-Crusoe-Gauguin-girls in parts through the war years and beyond. The most famous of these was in the popular Bob Hope/Bing Crosby "ROAD" pictures – those a strange combination of adventure, slapstick, ad-libs and Hollywood inside jokes. Of these she said, "I was the happiest and highest-paid straight woman in the business." Among her serious films were JOHNNY APOLLO and A MEDAL FOR BENNY.As for the plot, opps I see I'm out of time.

In the Island of Manukura, a French colony in the South Seas, the joyful Terangi (Jon Hall) is a leader among the natives and the first mate of the Katopua, the tall ship of Captain Nagle (Jerome Cowan). Terangi gets married with Marama (Dorothy Lamour) and sooner he sails to Tahiti. While in a bar playing with other natives, Terangi is offended by an alcoholic racist French and he hits his face, breaking his jaw. Despite the testimony of Captain Nagle, Terangi is sentenced to six months of forced labor since the victim had political connections with the Powers That Be. Captain Nagle asks the Governor Eugene DeLaage (Raymond Massey) to uses his influence to help Terangi, but the governor refuses. Terangi unsuccessfully tries to escape from the prison, and each attempt increases his sentence. Eight years later, he finally escapes and his jailbreak is celebrated in Manukura. Father Paul (C. Aubrey Smith) finds his canoe and brings Terangi hidden to the island. But a devastating hurricane also arrives in the island threatening the dwellers. "The Hurricane" is a tale of injustice in the South Seas that recalls Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. The saga of the sweet Terangi is very similar to the story of Jean Valjean, both characters victims of the injustice of the French criminal system in those years. The sequence of the hurricane is very impressive for a 1947 feature. I can not say that the hurricane was brought in a divine intervention since the despicable governor saves his life in the end and most of the natives die. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "O Furacão" ("The Hurricane")

"The Hurricane" (1937) directed by John Ford is something like a lightening on a dark sky nowhere in South Pacific and it seems that the location was almost imposed by an adaptation, where the director during the shootings was for the most time laconic in his own direction's style of the time. In another words, showing the strength of the Earth above an island, cutting the edges of this reaction edited by the impact of the huge swallows waving against it : as a blind giant coming again and again, smashing the cliffs on the ground with its water mills, in a black and white picture of as almost science off fiction ; as though, poetry of nature it was instantly translated by such features of deaf intriguing machination, without any control by the smallest of the human beings present there. But out of such an attractive and storming leisure for the movie goers from yesterday as till tomorrow, as did a catastrophe movie as this one in Samoa, that is still of course a lesson of perfect conception of a tiny community, completely transformed in waste, by what we know now as atmospheric intervention. The most of the time during this fiction the reality of images and sound were enough to secure the viewer, astonished with the skill manner of Ford and his team, controlling the march of events as it was a realistic view of a hurricane as monster of the nature nearby. Who cares about the local population ? The priest in his church where are the inhabitants, that took the good way for searching a refuge, well placed for staying alive during the storm, it reveals that is the better place in the island as if it was the house of God the true antidote against the untempered sin of the natural turmoil. But this symbolism it has also in this movie only a partial effect within the mind of the viewers not exactly for preaching faith, but because its colonial architecture which it seems is strong enough to support such event, before the eyes and ears of the survivors. So that, such thing occurs when incapacity of human beings for another solution is at stake, for the enormous responsibility securing children, old people and domestic animals, all protecting a subsistence for a way of living in this kind of territories, lost on the ocean and at its mercy.The story works well and a little boy lies, when someone asked him where he and his mate were before, and he tells that he was fishing. If this tale in 1937 it works only as a movie for youngsters, savages and sailors from the end of the world, it was perhaps the reason why Ford was also so laconic during the rehearsal before the camera. When such a mechanical artifact for making special effects it was for him maybe the more important of the movie, likewise at the time of construction of dams elsewhere. Why such a reverse of desert on the soul of mankind ? There is the sensation that the director was concerned with the idea of the beginning of the world, by the sense of drowning and submerging land. Too by the inaccuracy of destiny with such an episodic natural event, from the bottom of the cracked undersea on the shores of an island, in the middle of the ocean surface. Like also imagining it with fair play, for a tale about escaping from there sound and saved for another human adventure of discovery and conquest, in affirmation of solitariness of soul and flesh, like the prisoner escaping on the boat viewing nothing in contrary in such a stormy environment watching himself such an opportunity and apparently without the need of any help.