OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS

This 1951 adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel is a real mess.  That being said it does have a few admirers, and I derived some pleasure in trying to work out why none of it was working.

Maybe the source novel is unfilmable, or perhaps it just isn't very good - it certainly comes across here as second-rate Graham Greene.

Exotic location?  Check.

Flawed protagonist?  Absolutely.

The protagonist, Willems, is a big problem because as played here by Trevor Howard he is a scoundrel with no redeeming features - he is lazy, selfish, bad-tempered, boorish, and self-pitying.

The other main characters don't offer much either.

Ralph Richardson plays Captain Lingard who befriended Willems when he was a boy, and who is prepared to help Willems when he has to flee Singapore having been caught stealing money from his employer.  

The bulk of the film takes place at a trading post which Lingard owns.  The sea captain is the only one who knows how to navigate the approach, giving him a lucrative trading monopoly.  I can't say I found Richardson convincing in this role.

Robert Morley is better cast as Almayer, Lingard's son-in-law, who manages the trading post, and who comes across as a quite unpleasant character in his own right.

Wendy Hiller is a fine actress who has the thankless task of trying to make something out of her role as Almayer's wife, but the screenplay gives her precious little to work with.

Then we come to the most problematic character, Aissa, the daughter of a local chieftain, no matter that she's in her twenties and he looks as though he's the wrong side of eighty.

Aissa is played by Kerima, a French actress.  She doesn't speak any lines in the film because at this time she had no acting experience and besides, her French accent would give away the game that she isn't as exotic as she seems.  This is something of a handicap, although perhaps it's a blessing that we don't have to endure any dialogue between her and Willems during their love scenes.  The version of the film I watched also lacked a two-minute kiss between them which received a lot of publicity, for which I was also thankful.

So yes, one of the two storylines here is that they have a passionate affair.  It's impossible to see what she sees in 38-year old Trevor Howard, which only emphasises how miscast he is.  Where was Richard Burton?

The director Carol Reed spent a lot of time searching for the right actress to play Aissa, so he has to take the blame for that casting decision.

He also has to bear a large part of the responsibility for the film lacking any dramatic momentum.

The second storyline concerns the efforts of a rival trader Alagappa to persuade Willems to betray Lingard by revealing how to navigate the approach to the trading post.  Willems does eventually do this, and then in turn is betrayed by Alagappa.  There should be some dramatic potential in all of this intrigue, but no, it counts for nothing the way it is directed and written.

Then we get easily the best scene in the film when Lingard makes his way upstream, where Willems and Aissa have unhappily ended up, and confronts Willems.  

At last, I thought, we're getting somewhere! But then the film ends, quite abruptly, some way short of the end of the novel.

An appropriately disappointing end to a frustratingly disappointing film.