Hurricane * (1979, Jason Robards Jr, Mia Farrow, Trevor Howard Max von Sydow, Dayton Ka’Ne, Timothy Bottoms, James Keach) – Classic Movie Review 5742

This wet and windy 1979 update on John Ford’s 1937 adventure movie The Hurricane re-tells the story based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall about a typhoon hitting a South Seas island.

Director Jan Troell blew it, and the De Laurentiis studio blew $22 million on it. Jason Robards Jr plays the governor Captain Bruckner and Mia Farrow plays his American painter daughter Charlotte Bruckner, who falls for young Samoan chief Matangi (played by Dayton Ka’Ne), against the will of her father.

With Trevor Howard as Father Malone, Max von Sydow as Dr Danielsson, Timothy Bottoms as Jack Sanford and James Keach as Sergeant Strang also starring in it too, you would expect something special going on dramatically, but unfortunately there really just isn’t.

The film is a passed-its-sell-by-date turkey and it bombed at the box-office.

There are marvellous technical credits. It is made by some of the cleverest people in cinema at the time – writer Lorenzo Semple Jnr, cameraman Sven Nykvist, scorer Nino Rota and designer Danilo Donati. So it may be worth a look just for their work. Certainly, visually, there is some spectacular Technicolor shooting on Bora Bora, Leeward Islands, French Polynesia, to recommend it.

Also in the cast are Richard Sarcione, Willie Myers [Alex W du Prel], Nancy Hall Rutgers, Manu Tupou and Nick Rutgers.

Swede Troell, inheriting the project from Roman Polanski who was in police trouble, made the superb The Emigrants.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5742

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