'Tondelayo' - sort of rolls off the tongue doesn't it? This was the picture that changed Hedy Lamarr's image from a chaste, unattainable ideal into a seductive temptress. I didn't quite know what to make of her when she first appeared on screen, her cocoa-butter smeared countenance almost made her look like a caricature, and those big, white eyes, whoa - they had that hypnotic, mesmerizing quality that viewers of the day only needed to take one look at and they'd have to do some acclimatizing of their own. Very sexy though, you have to admit.Poor old Langford (Richard Carlson), he didn't know what he was in for. Put in charge of his own rubber plantation, he loses sixty percent of the crop in just five months. You could understand why his boss Witzel (Walter Pidgeon) would be miffed, but that didn't seem to be the crux of their problem. Langford should have taken the old curmudgeon's advice not to manny-palaver with the ladies, it only got him into the deep end of the pool with Tondelayo. But come on, how could anyone help it when she wiggled that seductive body and made with the sexy accent. You'd need nerves of steel to disregard an advance like that.Langford managed for a time, but there's just so far good judgment could go with the intrepid adventurer. How could he when Tondeleyo challenges him with "Awyla, no want to palaver?". I'd palaver in a heartbeat myself. Still, it came across as a bit of a shock to hear Lamarr's character ask her new husband to beat her up once in a while just to keep the marriage interesting. You know, so the making up part would be all the sweeter. Boy, they sure took this thing into soft porn territory in more ways than one, even with the Motion Picture Production Code in effect. Gee, I wonder how they managed to rationalize this one.Well look, it's not high drama but it sure is entertaining. Nice support here from that guy behind the curtain in "The Wizard of Oz", Frank Morgan, as the inebriated doctor. Obviously, Witzel knew what he was talking about right from the start when he told Langford to beware, but gee, did he have to stuff that poison juna down Todelayo's throat? That just wasn't very gentlemanly.

First of all I took this film to be a stage play with all four actors having declaimed those lines hundreds of times. It turned out after the ending I went to the reviews, yes, it had been a stage play in London and the playwright was hired to write a film script. I think he just rearranged the scenes for the camera setups. It works very well as a stage play -- the actors in the film deliver the lines as if they had said them for months and each word is carefully enunciated --- no mumbling naturalism or words not made clear to the audience in the back rows. Some of the reviews denigrate Hedy Lamarr's performance.. I'm not a fan but I don't see how she could do anything else with it given the times and the restrictions. I say it is well worth watching for cinema students looking for how to rework a stage play

Maybe not a great film, but definitely watchable. First of all, I really enjoyed seeing Frank Morgan in his role as the doctor who uses liquor to cope with the backwater environment of an African rubber plantation. And Walter Pidgeon's role as the burnt-out manager of the plantation was an interesting contrast to some other roles he is known for. He is a firecracker ready to explode at the slightest provocation. Just the mention of certain words will set him off.I do think the script was lacking, partially because it was repetitious. Okay, we understand what words trigger the boss man's rage. We don't have to hear them over and over. Regarding the lines that Hedy Lamarr was handed, they are sometimes silly, but we know that the only English she has heard was from Pidgeon's character and a few others. She does as well with her lines as anyone could.Tondaleya's entrance is iconic. Whether you like the eyes accented by shadows and light, her presentation is a gamble that is consistent throughout the film and memorable. The first shot of Rita Hayworth in Gilda is similarly iconic.Another thing that bothered me was the comic ending. Was it tacked on in hopes of undercutting the dramatic "real" ending of the film? Could be. It was totally worthless. An afterword with a dramatic or ironic ending would have been more suitable and effective.I rated this a 5.

The character Tondelayo was totally non-credible. The role should have been cast using a black actress with some kind of accent. I think using Hedy Lamarr for this part ruined the whole movie. Ms. Lamarr looked like a white Austrian actress with dark makeup and she sounded like she was using a phony accent. It seems as though the producer was determined to produce this movie so he could cast Ms. Lamarr in the role. This resulted in turning what might have been a better-than-average movie into something totally non-believable. Ms. Lamarr was the "fly in the ointment" in this film. Black actresses may have been hard to come by in 1942, but it would not have been impossible to find one.