Wake of the Red Witch (1948)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely Brilliant!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

"The Wake of the Red Witch" is a curious film in that it stars John Wayne as a villain, or at least as something closer to a villain than to the sort of clean-cut characters Wayne usually played, or even to his flawed heroes in films like "The Searchers" and "The Shootist". The story is based upon what the opening credits call the "famous best- selling" novel by Garland Roark. (Well it might still have been famous in 1948, only two years after it was published, but since then both it and its author have sunk into obscurity). It is a melodramatic seafaring yarn which owes something to Joseph Conrad. Wayne's character Captain Ralls is a ship's captain in the Dutch East Indies during the 1860s. When we first meet him he is preparing to intentionally wreck his own ship, the "Red Witch", which is carrying a valuable cargo of gold bullion, by grounding it on a reef. After he does so he is called before a court of inquiry, but before the court can reach its verdict the case is dropped by the ship's owner, Mayrant Sidneye.In 1950 Alfred Hitchcock caused some controversy by including a "lying flashback" in "Stage Fright". Flashbacks had traditionally been used to reveal the true situation, so Hitchcock's use of the device to show one character's false account of events, without revealing to the audience until later in the film that this account was indeed false, came as a surprise to many. Here, however, in a film made two years earlier, director Edward Ludwig does something almost equally controversial. He presents us with two contradictory flashbacks; one is told from the viewpoint of Sidneye and the other, although it is narrated by a secondary character, Sidneye's niece Teleia Van Schreeven, essentially tells us Ralls's side of the story. It is already clear that the two men are enemies of long standing, and the two flashbacks, taken together, explain the reason for their enmity, why Ralls sank the Red Witch and why Sidneye dropped the proceedings against him. The full story is too complicated to set out here, but it revolves around their rivalry for the love of the same woman, Angelique.The highly melodramatic plot, in fact, gets a bit too convoluted at times and can be difficult to follow. The film has other weaknesses as well. Wayne never seems completely at home playing Ralls, a man driven at least in part by jealousy, greed and desire revenge, and considerably more complex than the average John Wayne hero. Gail Russell, who had also starred with Wayne the previous year in "Angel and the Badman", is a bit insipid as the lovely Angelique. The scene where Ralls has to fight a giant octopus, which is guarding a treasure of pearls, is horribly unconvincing. (This scene may have inspired a similar scene in another seafaring yarn from a few years later, "Pearl of the South Seas", which features an even more ludicrously unconvincing giant octopus).On the other hand, Luther Adler is good as the greedy and obsessive shipping magnate Sidneye, and Ludwig's unusual narrative style does enough to hold our interest. "The Wake of the Red Witch" is far from being a classic of the cinema, but it still remains watchable today. 6/10

If ever a movie deserved the expression, "they don't make 'em like this anymore", it is "Wake of the Red Witch". Set in the South Seas during the mid-Nineteenth Century it stars John Wayne as Captain Ralls, a tough ship's master, and a man embittered by unhappy memories. Ralls has fallen in love with the same woman as Mayrant Sydneye, a powerful trader played by Luther Adler, setting in motion a rivalry that is mutually destructive. The film contains two extensive flashbacks that reveal the reasons behind Ralls' bitterness. Although flashbacks were a staple of movies at the time, "Wake Of The Red Witch" contains flashbacks within flashbacks, giving the film more layers than the linoleum on an old kitchen floor."Wake Of The Red Witch" also has a number of scenes that rely on special effects for their impact. The special effects crew must have buckled at the knees when informed that the script called for a battle with a giant octopus over a chest full of pearls, a native diver trapped by a giant clam, a couple of shipwrecks and finally, a sunken ship sliding off a rock shelf into the depths below.When John Wayne wrestles the octopus, he doesn't actually wrap the tentacles around himself like Bela Lugosi did in Ed Wood's "Bride of the Monster", but it's close. Incidentally, it's the same octopus. The South Sea island settings were also a challenge for the set designers, and tend to resemble a K-Mart garden centre.Of more concern is the way Wayne falls in and out of character. From the driven and ruthless Ralls in the earlier scenes, he becomes the tough, but warm-hearted character familiar to anyone who has seen films such as Rio Bravo or Sons Of Katie Elder – all that was needed to completely dispel the mood would have been for him to don a cowboy hat.That "Wake Of The Red Witch" works at all is due to its outlandish, larger-than-life story, Wayne's personal magnetism, and to very good work by the supporting cast. Luther Adler as Mayrant Sydneye projects power and menace but also invests his character with enough humanity to gain sympathy. Through his portrayal, the conflict with Ralls attains a depth that just about saves the movie. Gail Russell as the doomed Angelique also shines in her role. She provides the perfect foil to Wayne's testosterone charged Ralls, making believable his transformation into the gentle, sensitive lover he becomes in her company."Wake Of The Red Witch" is so over-the-top it almost defies criticism. Later in his career, John Wayne would bring a certain amount of self-parody to his roles but in "Wake of the Red Witch" he plays it straight. He inhabits his character by sheer screen presence rather than by any finely honed acting chops. However for Wayne fans that is probably enough.

I'll bet the novel was a corker, big and fat, because the movie that Republic made out of it is pretty complicated. The fundamentals are clear enough though. John Wayne is Master of the Red Witch in 1860 and, with the complicity of his first mate, Gig Young, runs her aground and sinks her along with her cargo of millions of dollars in gold. Young believes that Wayne does it for the money, but in fact, as we learn through a series of flashbacks, he's doing it chiefly because he hates the owner of the ship, the phenomenally wealthy Luther Adler.The mutual hatred goes back seven years, to a time when Adler, dead heading it on one of his ships -- he owns many -- plucked Wayne out of the water and saved him from death by shark. At the next port, they both fall for Angelique Desaix, Gail Russel, and it's easy to see why. She's more of a blue-eyed, black-haired ghost than a young woman. She's strikingly attractive. Her pale beauty has a lunar sheen. And when she manages to raise her voice above a whisper it sounds like a high school girl's. She seems shy in front of the camera. She WAS shy. It's all very magnetic, enough to make any normal man sit her on his knee and whisper reassurances while he nibbled her ear.Well, Russel falls for one of the two men. She has a choice between the young, vigorous, handsome, tall, plain-spoken Wayne, and the squat, greedy, insinuating, lizard-eyed Luther Adler. Guess which one she chooses? Not that it does her any good. Her tradition-bound French father arranges her marriage to Adler. Wayne stalks off. Russell is heart broken.One thing leads to another. Adler is bound to a wheelchair by the disease that kills Russell. Pearls come and go. Ships blow up. And millions of dollars of gold that belong to Adler sit in the belly of the sunken Red Witch, whose location is known only to Wayne.Wayne's performance is about at par. That is to say, he's John Wayne. That slow drawl, that slight grin, all seemed to define his range as an actor. He never changed much during his career and came eventually to believe in his own legend. (He was hesitant about admitting that he had lung cancer because the public Duke should not be laid low by a disease.) He seemed not to recognize it when he showed his considerable talent in character roles in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," for instance, or "True Grit." After "The Wake of the Red Witch," I don't think he ever allowed his screen character to approach villainy so closely.In any case, this may be Luther Adler's film. He's the most talented actor in it and his role is the most complex. Adler's rage towards Wayne animates his days. It has joined his lust for pelf as his chief reason for living. It may have saved his life from the disease that crippled him. At one point, a meddlesome Dutch official tells Adler that his understanding is that bad blood exists between him and Wayne. Priceless, the way Adler rolls his eyes innocently, wonderingly, and replies, "Ohh, NOOOO." It's about the only comic moment in an otherwise dramatic film. And the plot itself doesn't add up to much. There's a lot of hooey about Wayne killing a giant octopus and being called "Son of Taratua", a white god, by "the natives." There's a Pearl Festival. There's a speech by Wayne about how a man can breathe free on a ship under sail. None of it makes me want to read the novel.

My all time favorite of all the John Wayne movies. It came out when I was a young girl and I have seen it 34 times, and would watch it again if I could find a video. Compared to special effects today, it is lacking, but I believe it was one of his best.