Before there were big-budget blockbusters loaded with costly and elaborate special effects, there were filmmakers and technicians who knew how to do a lot with a little. John Ford's 1937 drama, romance, and disaster epic The Hurricane sure packs a lot into one movie, and its special effects are, for the era in which it was made, surprisingly effective. This was a movie that, at least at the beginning, Ford very much wanted to direct: He had read and loved the novel on which it's based, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (also the authors of Mutiny on the Bounty). According to Scott Eyman's 1999 Ford biography Print the Legend, Ford sent a message to producer Samuel Goldwyn from Honolulu, lobbying for the honor of adapting the book: "AM MORE THAN EVER CONVINCED I SHOULD WORK WITH YOU ON IT STOP WISH YOU COULD CONVINCE DARRYL [ZANUCK]...REGARDLESS WHO MAKES PICTURE POSITIVE IT WILL BE SUPERB AND REBOUND TO YOUR GLORY."

But this wasn't just a simple act of an already established director asking a powerful producer for a job. Ford and the notoriously controlling Goldwyn had worked together before, and clashed mightily, during the filming of Arrowsmith (1931); during filming, the hard-drinking Ford would become so angered by Goldwyn's unwanted interventions that he would sometimes go AWOL for days at a time. But Goldwyn, somewhat surprisingly, hired Ford for The Hurricane, offering him a salary of $100,000 and 12 percent of the film's net profits. He also told Ford he could shoot on location in the South Seas, and chartered Ford's own beloved yacht, the Araner, for use in the picture.

But if there's ever any such thing as smooth sailing in the movie business, there certainly wasn't much of it in the making of The Hurricane. The picture tells the story of Terangi, a young man from a Polynesian island (played by a newcomer named Jon Hall, the nephew of one of the novel's co-authors), who is imprisoned unjustly by white colonialists and tries desperately, and repeatedly, to escape in order to return to his home and his young wife, Marama (Dorothy Lamour, in full sarong regalia). With each attempted escape, his term is lengthened by years, and his treatment at the hands of a sadistic prison warden (John Carradine) only increases his misery. In the end, a tropical storm sweeps in, nature's way of avenging the cruelty of mankind and wiping the slate clean.

The strong cast of established actors in the film included Raymond Massey, Thomas Mitchell, and Mary Astor, the last of whom spoke highly of her exacting and often-temperamental director: She called him "terse, pithy and to the point." Also, she noted, he was "very Irish, a dark personality, a sensitivity which he did everything to conceal."

In fact, working with actors didn't seem to be a problem on The Hurricane. It was Goldwyn's reversal of a major promise he had made to Ford that changed the nature of the project. Goldwyn had told Ford he would be able to shoot on location, but then changed his mind -- the producer was notoriously averse to location shooting because it meant ceding too much control. "For atmosphere, the director had to make do with a few second-unit location shots taken in Samoa, some seafaring scenes he filmed about the Araner off Catalina Island, and wind machines blowing sand and water on the Goldwyn back lot in Hollywood," writes Joseph McBride in his 2001 book Searching for John Ford. Goldwyn also, according to McBride, brought in Ben Hecht to rewrite the movie in 72 hours; Hecht claims that Ford took the new dialogue scenes that Hecht had so hastily written and "shot them without reading them," suggesting the director's apparent indifference to the picture by that point.

Still, perhaps miraculously, Ford and Goldwyn had only one major clash on the set of The Hurricane. That didn't mean there weren't minor irritations. According to Eyman, Goldwyn would come to the set and complain: At one point, he told Lamour that her hair had the look of a cheap wig, a remark that upset the actress. (Ford defended her.) The bigger blowup came later, when Goldwyn showed up on set with Ira Gershwin in tow. Ford was working on a crane and had himself lowered upon seeing his boss, only to have Goldwyn complain to him that there weren't enough close-ups in the picture, particularly of Lamour. The argument devolved into something close to a shoving match, with Ford eventually showing Goldwyn the door. As Eyman reports, Goldwyn turned to Gershwin and said, "Well, at least I put the idea in his head." And in the end, The Hurricane did include a perfectly satisfying number of close-ups, both of Lamour and of the other principals.

There is still no doubt, though, that the glorious, and genuinely unnerving, tropical storm that caps the picture is its greatest achievement. The wind whistles and screams, whipping up fantastic waves of water that seem truly menacing; terrified citizens cling to trees for safety, often in futility. Ford shot the sequence with second-unit director James Basevi, who was responsible for staging it. There are plenty of strong moments in the film, but the storm-tossed climax is the place where Ford was able to fully exercise his gifts for drama, spectacle, and grandeur. While critics weren't particularly kind to the film, audiences flocked to it, and it made big money for both Goldwyn and Ford. With its half naturalistic, half expressionistic visual effects, it also laid a great deal of groundwork for disaster films to come. You could call it an imperfect perfect storm.

By Stephanie Zacharek

SOURCES:

IMDb
Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, Simon & Schuster, 1999
Dan Ford, Pappy: The Life of John Ford, Prentice-Hall, 1979
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford, St. Martin's Press, 2001

Producer: Samuel Goldwyn
Director: John Ford
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols (adaptation), Oliver H.P. Garrett (adaptation), Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (novel), Ben Hecht (uncredited)
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Music: Alfred Newman (uncredited)
Film Editing: Lloyd Nosler
Cast: Dorothy Lamour (Marama), Jon Hall (Terangi), Mary Astor (Madame DeLaage), C. Aubrey Smith (Father Paul), Thomas Mitchell (Dr. Kersaint), Raymond Massey (DeLaage)
[black and white, 110 minutes]