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.
