Tropic Zone (1953)

Truly Dreadful Film

Such a frustrating disappointment

Powerful

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Ronald Reagan (Dan McCloud), Rhonda Fleming (Flanders White), Noah Beery Jr (Tapachula Sam), Estelita Rodriguez (Elena), Grant Withers (Bert Nelson), John Wengraf (Lukats), Argentina Brunetti (Tia Feliciana), Rico Alanez (Captain Basilio), Maurice Jara (Marcario), Pilar Del Rey (Victoriana), Nacho Galindo (willing worker). Director: LEWIS R. FOSTER. Screenplay: Lewis R. Foster. Based on the 1940 novel Gentleman of the Jungle by Tom Gill. Photographed in Technicolor by Lionel Lindon. Film editor: Howard Smith. Music: Lucien Cailliet. Song "I'm in the Mood for Love" (harmonica solo) by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. Art directors: Hal Pereira, Earl Hedrick. Costumes: Edith Head. Dance director: Jack Baker. Producers: William H. Pine, William C. Thomas. A Pine-Thomas Production. Copyright 1 January 1953 (in notice: 1952) by Paramount Piuctures Corp. No New York opening. U.S. release: January 1953. U.K. release: 15 June 1953. Australian release: 24 April 1953. 94 minutes. Cut to 91 minutes in the U.K. SYNOPSIS: Freed from his long-term contact at Warner Bros, and now on his own as a freelance actor, Ronald Reagan was faced with the problem of finding work. Not just end-of-the-road assignments, but decent pictures that would maintain his star standing in the industry. His agent informed him that the going would be tough. 'Tropic Zone', a "B" readied by the Pine-Thomas mill, proved the best of a mere handful of offers. In 'Tropic Zone', Pine-Thomas explored the hazards of growing bananas amid greed and corruption in Central America. The film is actually a western, with plantations instead of ranches, and bananas instead of cattle. Reagan plays Dan McCloud, a roguish American on the run from a neighboring republic because of his involvement in a deposed political faction. Since McCloud is an expert fruit farmer, he is given a job by the local banana baron (John Wengraf), who wants to corner the market by taking over all the other plantations, including one owned by lovely Flanders White (Rhonda Fleming). COMMENT: By the humble standards of the "Two Dollar Bills", this is a reasonably fair adventure yarn, a bit long in the telling, more than a bit predictable in the plotting, but moderately well acted and directed.Reagan has much his usual role as the hero who trades in his feet of clay for an iron fist. The other players, led by the over-decorative Rhonda Fleming and the delightfully villainous John Wengraf, are also appropriately typecast. But the movie's main appeal lies neither in its story nor its actors, but in Lionel 'Around the World in 80 Days' Lindon's lush Technicolor cinematography. OTHER VIEWS: Except for his final film, The Killers (1964) — which was actually designed for TV anyway — Ronald Reagan was always personable and almost always a Mr. Nice Guy. A bit slow on the uptake maybe, but a hero who in the end could always be relied upon to embrace what the script thought was right. And not the least of his virtues, so far as women picture-goers were concerned anyway, was his impeccable dress sense. Conservative to the extreme — except perhaps for a too rakish tilt of the hat — Ronnie was rarely anything but a model of sartorial refinement. Even his down-and-out-in-the-tropics attire for 'Tropic Zone" was supremely well-cut. — John Howard Reid writing as Tom Howard.

The plot represents a variation on the cattle baron vs. small herders theme, or the oil baron vs. small producers theme("In Old Oklahoma"), Here, it's a banana baron((John Wengraf, as Lukats) on this small Caribbean Island populated almost exclusively by Hispanics, with the exception of most of the main characters. Flanders White(Rhonda Fleming)runs the second largest plantation here, and identifies with the smaller growers, because they are all dependent on Lukats to export their bananas. Sometimes, Lukats claims his ship doesn't have room for other people's bananas. Hence, one goal is to contract with a much bigger company to save space in their ships for the produce of the small growers. This will be realized near the end. On the other hand, Lukats wants to force the small growers to sell their plantations to him.Dan McCloud(Ronald Reagan), an American soldier of fortune and past banana plantation foreman, shows up at Flanders' house unexpectedly, as a refuge from a political revolution on the mainland. He criticizes some of the details of how the bananas are being gown on her plantation. Soon, she replaces her drunkard foreman(Nelson) with Dan, and they start some methods corrections. Nelson is hired by Lukats as his foreman. Now we have the bad boys running one plantation and the good guys(and gal) running the other main plantation. Nelson wants to get even with Flanders and Dan, so he leads a raid on Flanders' worker's village, burning their houses and wrecking other things. Dan and Flanders arrive and combat Nelson's goons. There is a fierce fight between Dan and the bigger Nelson. Lukats now wants Dan to turn off the water for Flanders' irrigation and the worker's houses, to imperil the banana crop and cause the workers to riot. He holds Dan to this action because he threatens to have Dan arrested as an undesirable illegal alien if he doesn't. Meanwhile, Dan's friend Sam has flown his plane to the mainland to obtain a contract from Tropical Fruit to export the bananas of the smaller plantations. Also, he learned that the revolutionaries Dan was fighting for have taken control of the government, hence he is not currently considered a fugitive from justice, removing the hold of Lukats over him. So, he turns the water back on. The Flanders and other small growers need to deliver 8000 banana bunches to the dock by noon the next day. They work through the night, and transport the bunches by every conceivable means to the dock, just in time.The screenplay begins languidly, with dances or singing by lithesome Elena Estebar, and the various principle characters getting acquainted. Reagan has 2 beauties interested in him in Rhonda and Elena. However, he mostly acts non-interested in the seductive Elena, who has a crush on him. Probably, he considers her too young and poor. He's more interested in Rhonda, who mostly maintains her business personality around Ronnie. She lacks the romantic fire of Elena. Nonetheless, Ronnie and Rhonda finally do a little romancing near the end. Elena dances or sings maybe 5 times, mostly in the first half. I understand that Paramount spent a bundle recreating a banana worker's village in their facility, and staffing it with Latinos, although probably most should have been African Americans.See it in color at You Tube

At the hysterically campy conclusion of this Technicolor romp, you half expect Carmen Miranda to pop out among the thousands of bananas being marched down to the docks in a procession which seems to have influenced Cecil B. DeMille's method of having the Hebrews leaving Egypt in "The Ten Commandments". Ronald Reagan believes himself to be wanted on the mainland for a crime he didn't commit and is hiding out on this Caribbean Island where all of the natives are Hispanic, not one black among them. He becomes the foreman for Rhonda Fleming's banana plantation, making an enemy out of her drunken former foreman (Grant Withers, aka the final Charlie Chan) and the ruthless buyer (John Wengraf) out to take over all of the island's plantations. Then, there's Estelita Rodriguez, the pint-sized Mexican spitfire in love with Reagan who has an initially polite rivalry with Fleming over her desire to monopolize Reagan's time and Noah Beery Jr. as the very cheery side-kick in love with Rodriguez himself. Rodriguez gets to sing a few sultry numbers and devours each of her lines as if it was the biggest banana split she could get her claws on.A delightful adventure in the Jon Hall/Maria Montez vein, you might confuse this as an unofficial remake of Warner Brothers' "Torrid Zone" which dealt with the same subject. However, other than bananas and villains, the two share nothing in common, but are both tremendously entertaining. Fleming, a beauty who could pass as Maureen O'Hara's twin, isn't as feisty as her look-alike, but don't underestimate this red-head. She's a worthy match for any man and a fantastic business woman here to boot, showing that women business owners can do more than run beauty companies. Reagan is light-hearted and charming, even if his character at first seems a bit amoral. If you're lucky enough to land a copy of this, you might want to consider keeping it, because you'll want to re-visit it over and over as a forgotten treasure of camp where the characters are as bananas as the fruit they pick.

This is the umpteenth version of the gorgeous damsel in distress(Fleming) whose valuable banana plantation is coveted by a villain .But fortunately a raider (Reagan)comes to her rescue. This is conventional to a fault,a weak adventure story padded out with a lot of exotic dances ,all performed by a brunette who's "crazy about" the hero and thus is jealous of Fleming.