The rhapsody of desire and the illusory promise of complete freedom, the eyes shining in the dark and squirming skin in moonlit water and the glow of the volcano god’s promised wrath burning against the stars – King Vidor’s Bird of Paradise paints in vivid monochrome but evokes fervent colour.
It was a problematic production and a painful flop for RKO Pictures, one that dogged David Selznick’s spell as studio chief and affected subsequent productions including that of King Kong (1933), which reused some of its sets and in some ways remixed its basic ideas in contending with the allure the exotic and the call of the forbidden.
Bird of Paradise nonetheless broke ground as an iconic work of early sound-era film, stirring up both the kind of outrage, with its nudity and relatively frank interracial eroticism, that would bring on the Production Code, whilst enlarging the palette of the rapidly evolving mode of sound cinema with Max Steiner’s full orchestral sound wound in constantly and tightly with Vidor’s intense, rhythmically aware image flow.
Lumped with a cornball play by Richard Walton Tully by the previous studio head, Selznick pressed it on Vidor, who revised it into another of his moral dramas, taking the basic proposition of his filmography, an investigation into Civilisation and Its Discontents, and placing it at a far extreme.
The very opening conflates geography with a sex joke as a yacht aims to penetrate the narrow passage through the guarding reef of a remote Pacific island; shortly after the same joke is verbalised as one character deplores the idea they’re in “the Virgin Islands.” Most of the yacht crew are the familiar chorus of witty grumps you see a lot in American films from the period,
A gang of sophisticate lushes on the run from such boons of civic society as Prohibition; drinks with ice are hefted into frame with the same sense of delight in as Dolores Del Rio’s midriff. An undertone of frenzy thrums below early scenes as the crew of the yacht toss gifts to the excited natives of the island. One gift, a knife, is snatched up by chieftain’s daughter Luana (Del Rio), who puts it to good use right away when one of the yacht hands, Johnny Baker (Joel McCrea), harpoons a shark only to get the lead rope wrapped around his ankle; he plunges into the water tethered to the marine monster. Luana saves him by handily severing the rope.
Johnny awakens to his saviour excitedly explaining her actions in a language he can’t understand, but another language is working very well. Luana leads the ritual mating dance under the bewildered, leering eyes of the visitors: Vidor’s edits and Steiner’s music entwine orgasmically until all the sturdy young Polynesian men sweep in to snatch up their women, and Johnny does the same to Luana, only to be fended off by her father and the shaman, who insist she is taboo.
Luana has anointed status not only as a princess but because she plays a religious role for her tribe that comes with a bleak intent: only she can ward off the fury of Pele, the volcano goddess, by casting herself into the flames if the need arises. Either way Johnny, at first just looking for a furrow to sow wild oats in but eventually tethered body and soul to Luana, crashes headlong through the ban. Luana swims out to the boat in the night, a stark naked sylph, the forms and folds of her body glistening in the moonlight that spears the water.
Johnny is hooked, falls into the brine, chases her to the shore, and gives her the gift of the kiss after a moment of confused struggle. Later she reverses the moment and turns it into jokey role-play, the kabuki of resistance and surrender. Every lover remakes the essential moment. Johnny talks his boss into leaving him behind for a spell, and he and Luana retreat to a secluded shore where they can recline in the balm of each-other. The tribe capture Luana and try to marry her to a warrior, and smash Johnny’s boat, but Johnny steals her back and this time flee further to a neighbouring island, where they build a home in the jungle. Their world is an endless bounty – but then the volcano wakes up.
Bird of Paradise certainly exemplifies the raciness of pre-Code cinema, surpassing even the likes of Tarzan and His Mate (1933) in its unabashed glee in exhibiting the bodies of its stars and depicting a romance that crosses nominal colour and religious barriers, although eventually Johnny and Luana still have to pay the price for their transgressions and face up to the painfully binding nature of identity. The basic story is, of course, the archetype of all tropical dramas to the point of ridicule, even transmitted via lampoons like Joe Versus the Volcano (1988).
Bird of Paradise doesn’t quite capture the mood of ethereal, mythic starkness F.W. Murnau brought to his similar Tabu (1930), but Vidor’s sense of the sensual is riper, whilst his filmmaking probes the physical and finds the transcendent, and as always the cruel dualism he senses within the nature that dominates humankind hatches out. Vidor rhymes his two young lovers with their counterparts trapped in the machines of war and urbanisation in The Big Parade (1926) and The Crowd (1928), except here utilising an Arcadian fantasy to still squeeze them between civilisations and ways of comprehending the world’s working. ““East is east and west is west,” Mac (John Halliday), Johnny’s boss, quotes grimly (“What’s the dope on the north and south?” a pal retorts), and of course it’s not that simple: humans everywhere find ways to make their own lives agony, but perhaps only do so in response to the meaner impositions of reality.
The fugitive lovers on the rack chant prayers to their different gods in contrapuntal language, but they’re at the mercy of societies that make and unmake gods according to their needs.
The fires of the volcano in the night look forward to the seething cauldron of the smelter in Beyond the Forest (1949), by which time Vidor’s yearning innocents would have devolved into yearning murderess but still driven by the same guttering need, whilst Johnny and Luana’s determination to live according to their natures presages the ego fantasia of The Fountainhead (1948).
The gyrating build of frenzied intensity seen in the film’s first third repeats in the last, although now the urge towards coupling is now tested by a world seeming to refuse to let them be, forcing Johnny to brave whirlpools and lava streams as he chases after Luana, a fantastically visualised odyssey of ordeal Johnny meets as primal man, driven only by pure need to defy a natural world that seems bent on his annihilation.
The shock of violent death falling like the hand of a deity comes not by volcano god however, but to the islanders who plan to sacrifice him by the guns of Johnny’s pals, fortuitously returned to stop him being delivered along with Luana to the flames. The shriek of reality-twisting horror from the islanders as they experience such horrible power is given strange and potent force.
The shock of modern war’s introduction to paradise is answered by noble sacrifice as Luana leaves her wounded lover’s side and heads off to meet Pele whilst Johnny sleeps. McCrea would go on to star on The Most Dangerous Game(1932), forming an odd trilogy with King Kong and this in contemplating the remote island and mimetic microcosm, whilst Del Rio lodged deeply in the minds of a generation of young men as an erotic ideal, including that of future lover and Vidor acolyte Orson Welles.
