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Above: Robert Maguire cover art for W. Somerset Maugham’s Ah King, a collection of stories set in the Federated Malay States and its vicinity during the 1920s. It was originally published in 1933, and this amusing Berkley Books edition came in 1958.
We’re not sure a title like White Woman would fly today, but it certainly grabbed our attention, as did the cast. Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard? That has to be good, right? Lombard plays a widow in Malaya (now Malaysia) whose husband’s suicide has made her persona non grata. For money she sings in a “native” café, which is a scandal in white circles. Laughton offers her a way to reclaim lost status through marriage, an offer she cynically accepts only to discover after moving to Laughton’s jungle riverboat that he’s a human monster right out of darkest Joseph Conrad. But the plantation’s overseer Kent Taylor looks pretty good to her, and the attraction is mutual. Ultimately, the story is about their efforts to escape Laughton’s clutches.
White Woman brings the usual cringe moments endemic to vintage movies set in the tropics, and there’s sexual presumption toward Lombard that might make smoke issue from the ears of some viewers, but as always, these are problems you have to expect. What you don’t expect is clunky staging, and dialogue that occasionally grinds inexplicably to a halt. But we’re going to recommend the movie anyway because of Laughton. He’s unreal in this. His character is cruel and manipulative, murderous and hubristic, while also an effeminate dandy. We wonder if the filmmakers were trying to imply that he’s closeted, thus mean to Lombard because of her womanhood. We’ll never know the answer. In any case, there’s a lot to the role and Laughton hams up his portrayal of pure evil shamelessly, and sometimes hilariously.
White Woman is a pre-Code production, so it’s more vivid than most movies from the mid-thirties onward. In many cases the pre-Code lack of censorship led to daring sexual content, and indeed Lombard wears tops with plunging necklines and is seemingly braless in one sequence, but it’s gore that the filmmakers lean into here. In one instance a Malay tribesman lobs a human head through a window. However, the image that will really stay with you comes at the end. It must have horrified filmgoers at the time. It even shocked us a little. We won’t tell you what it is, though. Take a leap of faith and watch White Woman. It could never qualify as a good movie, but easily fits the bill as one you should experience and discuss. It premiered today in 1933.
Above you see a nice cover by an uncredited illustrator for 1959’s Womanhunt, written by Harry Wilcox posing as his alter ego Mark Derby and published in this Ace paperback edition in 1960. This is interesting visual work. You notice that the femme fatale’s eyes resemble the tiger’s eyes. That comparison is at the crux of the tale Derby tells. In the story a government agent named Dickson (Dix to his friends) is sent upcountry in Malaya to pose as a big game hunter there to kill a deadly tigress, while behind the scenes he’s searching out a communist cabal and determining whether an agent already there is doing her job or has turned.
That agent—Anna Swansey—is someone Dix barely knows but is “miserably and hopelessly in love with.” Under the pressure of his mission, his feelings turn into a consuming obsession. As high concept novels go, the idea of trying to stalk an apex predator, arouse love within a woman, and expose a spy ring all at once is as ripe as it gets. There’s a lot going on at all times, and Derby keeps multiple plates spinning on sticks while treating readers to some nice passages, like this one:
Before her magnificent body, an electric apparition of charcoal, gold, and white, had passed out of sight, he had a second view of her snarl, the haughty sneer that drew mouth and white whiskers high and quivering on each side, the narrowing of the usually rounded eyes, the flash of the ivory teeth.
At one point Dix is alone in the jungle and hears the tigress’s roar. It’s a moment when he realizes, terrifyingly, that his hunt of her may have turned into her hunt of him:
He jumped as if a cannon had gone off. He had got it into his head that she was somewhere over on his right, or behind him, and this growl came from directly ahead. It sounded awesomely near, too. [snip] The roar, a sound which perhaps only one in every million human beings ever hears, and only one in ten million ever hears at close quarters, filled the dark jungle with shock. There was a moment, perhaps of one second, during which Dix did nothing but stiffen; then his arms moved and the beam of the flashlight mounted on the rifle barrel cut a cone of light in the dark clearing.
The title of book registers weird in 2024, but it isn’t misogynist—or not very. A few web pages say the woman of the hunt is, metaphorically, the tigress. No. It’s a metaphor, alright, but not one that simple. The woman of the hunt is actually both the tigress and Anna. That’s made clear because Derby flogs the woman-as-tigress metaphor until it’s welted from nose to tail. But he’s also capable of smirking at it, briefly anyway, such as here:
“My grandfather used to say that a tigress was a woman, a woman who did not wish to be caught. She would hide down trails the hunter didn’t know and, just like a woman, her lies would be more clever than his traps. That’s what he used to say.” ’Che Kadan was fond of quoting his grandfather, who’d been one of the Malayan sultans—an old man of character, it seemed, since his quoted remarks were invariably mere clichés or sentimental platitudes which must have been remembered for the authority with which he’d uttered them.
It’s a comparison that’s probably insulting to most modern women, but don’t let it fool you. The tale is steeped in debilitating male emotion, lustful obsession, existential terror, and a desperate loneliness. It reads tragically at times, as Dix tries but fails to keep Anna from slowly taking over his thoughts. And that’s another unusual aspect of the book: Dix is increasingly driven by jealousy. At first it’s directed only against Anna’s boss Charlton Lang, who also wants her badly and uses his authority to constantly keep her near him in a work capacity. Then Anna’s ex-lover shows up. Dix is driven near to madness by this event.
Derby deals in high emotion. For example, big cats generally kill humans when they’re the only obtainable prey. Usually the animal is hurt, or very old. Dix sympathizes with the tigress, doesn’t consider her to be in any way at fault, but people keep getting eaten, so he has no choice about killing her—not merely as matter of his cover, but as a matter of saving lives. His conflict over this is wrenching, symbolic of terrible choices forced on us all. To add an extra ingredient, he isn’t an experienced hunter. He can shoot—but he isn’t expert. His pursuit of the tigress is ridiculously dangerous.
This is a great book. However, the usual warnings apply to colonial fiction. In addition, within the communist plotlines Dix’s quarries are all fools, monsters, or victims of coercion. Capitalism wasn’t then—and isn’t now—turning the world into a fruit laden banquet table overflowing with goodness for all, and Derby was surely smart enough to understand that. But despite the billions killed to establish and maintain his preferred global order, he never touches the reasons why alternative political philosophies take hold. In his mind, resistance comes from the deluded, from dolts who—for inexplicable reasons—believe colonials have no right to steal foreign lands. That may annoy the more politically astute readers.
But while more character depth on that front would have made Womanhunt perfect, and its total and rather smug one-sidedness means it has to be partly classified as propaganda, Derby can really construct and deliver an adventure. How do you wrap up a communist spy caper, Malayan big game hunt, and heart-hurting love story all at once? Those spinning plates never wobble. The hunt’s spectacular end flows immediately into the climax of the spy tale, and within that chaotic resolution the love story concludes with fireworks. We’ll be revisiting Derby soon.
Bette Davis was born with the first name Ruth, but nicknamed Betty from childhood. As an actress she changed the spelling to Bette after Honoré de Balzac’s La Cousine Bette, and people mangled the pronunciation routinely until she became a huge star. Speaking of letters, this promo photo is from her 1940 drama The Letter, based on a play by W. Somerset Maugham. Remember how we talked about how outward looking Hollywood was during its golden period, how it set so many films in exotic corners of the world? The Letter is another prime example. It’s set on a rubber plantation in Malaya. Thanks largely to Davis’s golden touch the film was nominated for numerous Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Score. It won nothing, but we assume the film is good anyway. We’ll watch it and report back.
Exotic Adventures was a men’s magazine put out by NYC based Gladiator Publications, Inc. It seems obvious the company had great ambitions, but it managed only six issues before folding. This one came in 1959 with cover art signed “Louis,” whose full identity is not given. In fact, only three people are listed as staff—editor George P. Wallace and two others—so the cover artist wasn’t the only hard worker who got short shrift. The individual authors are given bylines, though, as are the men who narrated their “true” tales to biographers.
Exotic Destinations lived up to its name, with pieces set in Kashmir, French Cameroon, Morocco, Honduras, Malaya, and Borneo, and nude models who are supposedly from Japan, Brazil, France, and Germany. It was all printed on glossy paper, which is why you won’t see the usual yellowing you get with old magazines, though the printing got a little streaky and inconsistent in the middle pages. Still, taken as a whole Exotic Adventures is a high quality publication, which we snared courtesy of the now idle Darwin’s Scans blog. Forty-plus panels below.
Here’s something backwards from what we usually share—a novel adapted from a film instead of vice versa. The Camp on Blood Island is a 1958 British-made World War II film written by J.M. White and Val Guest, and when you learn it was produced by schlockmeisters deluxe Hammer Film you could be forgiven for suspecting it was low rent b-cinema, but this is Hammer trying to be highbrow.
Near the end of the Pacific War, a Japanese prison camp commandant decides that if Japan surrenders he’ll execute all his prisoners. So the prisoners decide to prevent news of any prospective surrender from reaching the commandant by sabotaging communications, and they also prepare to rebel when the times comes.
We may check the film out sometime, but we were mainly drawn by the paperback art. Not only did it remind us that prison camp novels are yet another subset of mid-century literature, but we saw the Josh Kirby signature on this one and realized we haven’t featured him near enough. Last time we ran across him was on this excellent piece. We’ll dig around for more. And we may also put together a small collection of prisoner-of-war covers later. They range from true stories to blatant sexploitation, and much of the art is worth seeing.
Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.
Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remains at large for nearly forty years.
NBC radio broadcasts the cop drama Dragnet for the first time. It was created by, produced by, and starred Jack Webb as Joe Friday. The show would later go on to become a successful television program, also starring Webb.
Veronica Lake, beautiful blonde icon of 1940s Hollywood and one of film noir’s most beloved fatales, dies in Burlington, Vermont of hepatitis and renal failure due to long term alcoholism. After Hollywood, she had drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A New York Post article briefly revived interest in her, but at the time of her death she was broke and forgotten.
American author William Faulkner, who wrote acclaimed novels such as Intruder in the Dust and The Sound and the Fury, dies of a heart attack in Wright’s Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.
