Lady of the Tropics (1939)

Let's be realistic.

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

You would have thought that with such a good cast this would be a good film. It is actually a poorly scripted film with poor direction. The performances are good, but the characters aren't believable. Hedy Lamarr may have a convincing French accent, but I don't believe that she is half- Chinese. She doesn't look or sound Chinese in any way. If anything, she looks and sounds French. The film fails to explore the whole issue of inter-racial relationships. Instead, it focuses on citizenship and how you can marry to gain citizenship in America. This is a theme that Lamarr would explore more convincingly in 'Come Live With Me' with James Stewart. However, this film comes nowhere near the quality of 'Come Live With Me'.

Although some reviewers disagreed, I thought Jack Conway's direction was very smooth. I also found Robert Taylor's acting reasonably convincing, despite some of the hokey dialogue he was sometimes forced to handle. But the film belongs to sultry Hedy Lamarr who is efficaciously cast in this one as a beautiful half-caste in French Indo-China, whom American playboy Robert Taylor pursues and marries. Costumed by Adrian and strikingly photographed by George Folsey - often in film noir style - Hedy not only looks very young but suitably vulnerable. As noted above, co- star Taylor plays the hero with reasonable conviction, but is creamed in the acting stakes by Joseph Schildkraut who contributes a fascinating study in ego-maniacal cunning and evil. Others worth mentioning in the topflight cast include Mary Taylor – no relation of Robert Taylor. She was a New York model who – between 1936 and 1941 – made only four films (this is the second). She married producer Al Zimbalist in 1952. Despite her intriguing face, fetching figure and great performance here as Dolly Harrison, Mary Taylor was overlooked by reviewers who had eyes only for the dazzling Lamarr. Another in the great support cast that I would single out is Ernest Cossart, who often played priests and authority figures. Here he shoulders the white man's burden – an attitude which is now dated and even abhorrent! But to end this review on a more positive note, watch out for Gloria Franklin (in her second of only eight movies). She sings (or Harriet Cruise dubs) "Each Time You Say Goodbye (I Die a Little)" by Phil Ohman and Foster Carling.

With a script by Ben Hecht, LADY OF THE TROPICS is a film that recalled another Hedy Lamarr film--at least the title does--called "A Lady Without Passport"--a wretched film she made in 1950. Here too, she's a lady without passport and that's what triggers the entire plot. But it must be said that the comparison between the two films ends with the title.This is strictly old-fashioned melodrama reeking of either "Manon Lescaut" or "Madame Butterfly", with Hedy as the ill-fated heroine who allows herself to be "used" by Joseph SCHILDKRAUT while hiding her indiscretions from her smitten American admirer (ROBERT TAYLOR), who meets her in French Indochina (Saigon) before WWII and immediately falls in love with her. When Schildkraut gets revenge by planting false evidence of his association with Lamarr to open Taylor's eyes to the truth, the consequences turn tragic.Hedy has never been more beautiful and gives a sensitive performance as Manon (yes, that's her name!), a "lady of the tropics" with a sultry beauty enhanced by her MGM transformation into a stunning star who is always ready for her close-ups. Attired in an equally stunning Adrian wardrobe, she's a glittering testament to the power of Golden Age films to give stars glamor with a capital "G". Taylor, attired in white linen suits and Panama hats must have made female hearts flutter as the romantic hero willing to sacrifice all for his yen for Manon.It's a better film than I expected. Joseph SCHILDKRAUT makes a perfect villain, the kind you like to hiss, with his Oriental make-up and oily manner oozing menace at every quiet inflection of his voice. The B&W photography of some artfully designed sets is soothing to the eye and so, of course, is the teaming of Lamarr and Taylor--two of the most photogenic stars on the MGM lot.The script by Ben Hecht helps sustain interest in the storyline, even if it does get a bit too weepy toward the end. Lamarr shows evidence that she could be a very sympathetic heroine if given half a chance.

Despite a large budget and the usual MGM gloss, this is not a particularly good movie. Perhaps when it debuted in 1939 people knew nothing of Vietnam--this is the only way I can explain the insane casting of the Viennese Hedy Lamar as a woman who is half Vietnamese! Now if the casting of Austrian-born actress in the lead was the only problem, the movie still could have been interesting. However, the film has many more strikes against it--most notably the very, very limited range of the starlet in this film. Much of the time, she utters her lines as if almost half asleep and had practically no emotion to her performance. Part of this might have been because she was relatively new to America or perhaps she needed better direction. All I know is that she was beautiful to look at but rather vacant.To make things worse, although she is NOT a rich woman in the film, repeatedly she sports gowns that were right out of Vogue magazine--yet she is supposed to live in Vietnam, not Paris. Now the movie seemed to imply she was possibly a prostitute or a mistress--but even then, it seemed silly to have her traipsing around in one glamorous gown after another in a third world nation. One reviewer faulted the problem with the movie to be Robert Taylor's fault--I think it was all Hedy's.The bottom line is that aside from saying the film was set in Vietnam, you'd never guess it by watching the film. It is instead a sanitized and ridiculous Vietnam as seen by Hollywood.As for the plot, it's only okay. In many ways it's a bit reminiscent of Robert Taylor's earlier film, CAMILLE, as both are about fated romances. Most audience members will figure out rather quickly that this romance will not end well! So due to predictability, the plot wasn't able to counteract the lousy casting decisions. While I disliked the film, it seems most other reviews were very positive--so who's to say you may not enjoy it.By the way, just who or what was Joseph Schildkraut supposed to be in the film?! With his silly fake eyelids and lack of any conventional accent, I was left confused. Again, maybe 1930s Hollywood thought it was okay to say pretty much ANYTHING or ANYONE was Vietnamese--after all, who in the audience at the time would have known differently?