ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

JohnHowardReid CAST: Monte Blue (Dr Matthew Lloyd), Raquel Torres (Faraway), Robert Anderson (Sebastian), Renee Bush (Lucy), Bobby Andrews.The original director, ROBERT FLAHERTY, was replaced a third of the way through shooting by W. S. VAN DYKE when MGM decided to use professional actors to supplement the native cast. Photographed on locations in the Marquesas Islands by Clyde De Vinna, George Nogle and Bob Roberts. Film editor: Ben Lewis. Screenplay: Jack Cunningham. Dialogue and titles: John Colton. Adapted by Ray Doyle from the 1919 novel by Frederick O'Brien. Song "Flower of Love" by William Axt, David Mendoza, Dave Dreyer and Herman Ruby. Sound recording: Douglas Shearer. Executive producer: William Randolph Hearst. Producer: Hunt Stromberg.Copyright 17 November 1928 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corp. A Cosmopolitan Production. New York opening at the Astor, 31 July 1928. U.S. release: 10 November 1928. Sydney opening at the Prince Edward, 7 March 1929 (ran 8 weeks). 9 reels. 7,968 feet. 88½ minutes.SYNOPSIS: A doctor tries to save natives from an evil trader.NOTES: Academy Award, Cinematography, Clyde De Vinna only (defeating The Divine Lady, Four Devils, In Old Arizona, Our Dancing Daughters and Street Angel).MGM's first sound film, with a synchronized music score, sound effects and occasional dialogue.COMMENT: In many ways, this film recalls "Tabu" (1931) on which Flaherty quarreled with F.W. Murnau. Unfortunately, despite its award-winning photography (and its fascinating title), "White Shadows in the South Seas" is definitely the lesser movie.

kekseksa MGM did this film no favour by promoting it as their first "sound" film. Given the obsession with "sound" that dominated the US cinema industry in 1928 this meant that all criticism of the film tended to concentrate on whether it ws or was not a genuine "sound" film - which quite evidently it was not. It has a musical score by William Axt intermingled with a few sound effects but, since such orchestral scores were already common in major cinemas during the late silent era, only the degree of synchronisation (the first work of MGM sound recordist Douglas Shearer) represented any kind of innovation.And the value of the film is not of course there at all but lies, as with any other good silent film, in the strong script and excellent cinematography by Clyde de Vinna (who received the Oscar and would work on all Van Dyke's "exotic" films of the next few years - The Pagan, Trader Horn, The Eskimo) and Bob Roberts who has worked with Flaherty on Moana (1926) and would go on rather surprisingly to become one of the principal cinematographers in the flourishing Argentinian film industry.Normally speaking this film ought to represent everything that I tend to find crass and mediocre in US film. It is a producer's and cutter's film par excellence, chosen by Irving Thalberg himself and directed by the notorious "one-shot Woody"; Robert Flaherty who was initially to have directed was sacked for working too slowly.Yet I have to admit this seems to me in some ways the classic US film at its best before the influence of "sound" has become fully felt. It may not have been shot as it claims in the Marquesas but was nevertheless made on location in Tahiti and the cinematography is not in the least studio-bound nor overly preoccupied with continuity or glamorous "star"-focus. It makes use of local non-professional actors and actors and gives a dignified and not altogether paradisal picture of traditional island life. Even without the influence of Flaherty, the film is "too slow" for at least one other commentator, that is to say, probably just about right for any non-US audience. To my mind, it is not the "documentary" aspects of the film one would like to see curtailed but rather the tiresome and over-sentimental love-scenes (to please Thalberg's philistine colleague Stromberg), complete with a bit of "whistling" (to assuage the sound-buffs), which are quite the weakest feature of the film.Then, politically, as other reviewers have already remarked, it is a strong and unambiguous condemnation of colonial exploitation. In this respect there were two different trends in the US take on traditional cultures - the "progressist" notion on the one hand that they were picturesque but desperately and cruelly harsh (the view favored by Flaherty in Nanook or in The Man of Arran) and the "nostalgic" view of such cultures as "paradisial" (curiously also associated, almost by accident, with Flaherty who had been unable to find anything sufficiently gruesome on Samoa and had to be satisfied with reviving a defunct practice of painful body-tattooing for his 1926 film Moana). As a result Moana had been sold as an "idyll" and contributed to the development of a US "tiki" culture dominated by ideas of the "lost paradise" and "the noble savage".Probably this film, like Murnau's later Taboo, gained from the departure of Flaherty whose politics were always inclined to favour rather than condemn the "civilising mission". Thalberg and Van Dyke have strongly taken the opposite view while not exaggerating the notion of "paradise" either. In other words, they have successfully steered a course between two false myths (that of primitives saved by civilisation from the harsh savagery, on the one hand and that of a paradisal idyll on the other). Here, whether originally paradisal or not, we are shown a world that is victim to a genuinely savage exploitation by the dreg-end of colonialism (as in the stories of Joseph Conrad) but the contrast shown (very clearly in the parallel scenes of diving and in the more heavily allegorical opposition between pearls and fish-hooks), is not, despite a bit of false rhetoric, so much between a paradise and a hell but rather, quite simply and correctly, between a good and bad use of natural resources and between decent and indecent value-systems. In the later scenes the story turns totally to moral parable (the corrupting "white shadow" that develops in the hero himself), but, shorn of the more "mystical" elements of the original book, it remains on the whole a reasonably realistic representation, excellently played and excellently shot. The ending, which I shall not reveal although it is I some ways the most unusual feature of the film, is powerful where it could so easily have been facile. The film holds up well , as another reviewer remarks, beside Murnau's 1931 Tabu and compares very favourably indeed with King Vidor's 1932 The Bird of Paradise (a muddle of all conceivable myths and.a falsely glamorous star-vehicle).The same cannot be said for the marketing of the film which was a model of tasteless exploitation with Sid Grauman's "prologue" to the film at the Chinese Theater, "The Tropics", involving an extravagant array of "tiki" singing and dancing. All the same, that "white shadow"' past ad the film shown, the stars were also present to talk afterwards about their experience in making it.

silentmoviefan White Shadows of the South Seas has lots of wonderful scenery, both the plant and human kind. The women natives and leading lady Raquel Torres are not hard to look at, whatsoever. But... The ending? Awful, terrible and bad! Monte Blue is a drunken doctor who does what he can for the natives who need medical help. He also doesn't like the way his fellow white people exploit the natives. He strikes up a friendship with Raquel and things blossom into love. Earlier in the film, he told one of the white exploiters how awful he thought his practices were. Unmoved by this, the exploiter suggests he leave and continuing to do what he did would be hazardous to the doctor's health. Toward the end of the film, Monte takes up the cause again and the exploiter, keeping his word, has him shot. He dies and Raquel is shown weeping over his grave in the final scene. Not that bad a film, but the ending left me cold!

Robert Reynolds This movie, which is part silent and part talkie, is a tale of one man's disintegration, his actions which help to destroy an entire culture and his growing horror at what he has helped to bring about. The movie is still quite effective even now, more than 70 years later, largely because its concerns have probably been part and parcel with humanity's existence since we stopped being nomads and started building cities-greed, the struggle for control, the individual penchant for being your own worst enemy at times. A most memorable and compelling film, the cinematography is beautiful (it justifiably won an Oscar) and the film is one you will remember for a long while.