Lady of the Tropics (1939)

Absolutely the worst movie.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

***SPOILERS***Hedy Lamarr rightfully billed as the most beautiful woman in the world is half-cast French Asian belly dancer Manon de Vargnes in this tragic love story about forbidden love and the consequences that goes along with it. That in her getting involved with this good for nothing self admitted playboy or moocher who lives off the women that he romances American party boy Bill Carey played by the devilishly handsome, you can almost see the horns sticking out of his head, Robert Taylor. Carey who's to be hitched up or marry millionairess Dolly Harrison, Mary Taylor, drops her like a hot potato when he laid his eyes on the beautiful Manon at a swanky restaurant in Siagon-French Indo_Chins-while smooching off a free meal that Dolly's parents are treating him to.Even though already planning to marry rich and also half-breed French/Asian millionaire nobleman Pierre DDelaroch, Joseph Schildkraut, who's really got the hots for her Manon falls heads over heels for the handsome American Bill Carey who never worked a day in his life and doesn't have a penny to his name! We soon find out that Manon is torn between getting a passport to get out of the country that only Pierre, with his money and political connections, can provide her with or marrying the dirt poor but handsome Bill Carey. With whom she can only look forward to a life of living off the charity and kindness, as well as grubbing & scratching, of others! Madly in love and not willing to lose the beautiful Manon to a commoner as well as, what he thinks of him, bum on the street Pierre sets Carey up at first to have a job, the first one in his life, as a rubber inspector of pencil erasers at one of his rubber plantations and then marry Manon while he's out at work-which Carey hates with a passion-in the field.***SPOILERS**** The tragic ending in this crazy and confusing film has Manon in order to keep the outraged Carey from killing Pierre for taking her away from him by doing the job-shooting to death- on Pierre herself. Manon then shooting herself now peacefully dying in her lover Carey's arms, how touching, and about to breath her last breath has Father Antione,Earnest Cossart, summoned in to give her the last rites before she finally checks out for good. We see in the last few frames of the movie the passport that Pierre the lover that she killed got for Manon is in fact legit not fake which we were, by Pierre, lead on to believe. which Bill Carey was to use to get her out of the country but now totally useless for her! Since the beautiful Manon will never be able to see "The City of Lights" Paris the Eiffel Tower and most of all go sightseeing down the Champs-Elysee which she so long was dying, and in fact did, to do!

You would have thought that with such a good cast this would be a good film. It is actually a poorly scripted film with poor direction. The performances are good, but the characters aren't believable. Hedy Lamarr may have a convincing French accent, but I don't believe that she is half- Chinese. She doesn't look or sound Chinese in any way. If anything, she looks and sounds French. The film fails to explore the whole issue of inter-racial relationships. Instead, it focuses on citizenship and how you can marry to gain citizenship in America. This is a theme that Lamarr would explore more convincingly in 'Come Live With Me' with James Stewart. However, this film comes nowhere near the quality of 'Come Live With Me'.

Robert Taylor whizzes into Saigon with his rich pals and meets wide-eyed, innocent half-caste Hedy Lamarr. The others leave, but Taylor stays behind in his white suit and Panama hat and courts Lamarr, whose mixed racial background makes things difficult for her. For one thing, she can't get a passport. And although Taylor and Lamarr marry and love each other -- well, you can't live on the fruits of love. They run out of money and live in an exotic, run-down hotel so shabby that it resembles the hovel I now live in. Poor Taylor can't find a job either.Lamarr has a trick or two up her sleeve, so to speak. She was formerly a "friend" of Joseph Schildkraut -- the sinister, and most improbably Vietnamese villain your worst nightmare might incarnate. When Taylor gets drunk and passes out, Lamarr "visits" Schildkraut again. He takes her to the opera, Manon Lescaut, this being one of those movies in which the heavy has class.Schildkraut juggles circumstances and the unsuspecting Taylor finds himself offered a job at last. But things darken. Evidence emerges suggesting that Lamarr did a "favor" for Schildkraut, perhaps more generous than simply accompanying him to the opera, and that's how this job offer surfaced.A simple, naive, red-blooded, God-fearing American, true to his principles, Taylor flings Lamarr aside and announces that he's leaving on a ship for America without her. Distraught, Lamarr visits Schildkraut for the last time and shoots him dead. (I can't help imagine the two of them -- Schildkraut and Kiesler -- making jokes in German about their ludicrous Oriental makeup.) Lamarr returns to her squalid hotel and shoots herself somewhere in the body, probably a place that doesn't disfigure her too much. She dies slowly enough for Taylor to return and announce that his earlier renunciation of her was so much rodomontade, that he loves her deeply, and that the two of them are leaving on that ship together. It's only after he tells her this, that he realizes she is dying. "I'll get a doctor!" "No, no. Don't leave me." For the next several minutes, the question hangs in the air: Who will be the first to expire, Lamarr or the viewer? (And this script comes from BEN HECHT, the fedora-wearing, go-to-hell newspaper reporter from Chicago!) I could never get with Robert Taylor (b. Spangler Arlington Borough) either as a man or an actor. He was certainly handsome enough in these early movies, enough so that questions were raised at the time about his having hair on his chest. (His agent produced a photo of a shirtless Taylor to show that he did.) But his features coarsened with age and MGM kept him soldiering on in lower budget pictures for more than a decade. Hedy Lamarr was a stunning beauty, once glamorized by Hollywood's star-making machine. In her first, notorious film, "Ekstase", the teen-aged Hedi Kiesler seemed a little zoftig in her nude scenes, but enormously appealing, even if not yet etherealized.The set dressing is fine though, jaded as we now are with real location shooting, we can never believe that we are actually in French Indo-China. The photography is professional too.

I remember when I was living in Vietnam, I was told that Eurasian women were the most beautiful in the World. The French-Vietnamese women that I saw were indeed exquisite. Hedy Lamarr was perfectly caste as one of these women, and her performance in this film was so romantic that one would want to see it over and over.This fine film featured Oscar-nominated cinematography, a script by the great Ben Hecht (Wuthering Heights, Notorious, The Scoundrel, Underworld), and Robert Taylor as the leading man.The story is as old as time and you cannot fail to be moved by the tragedy.