This unusually classy Republic Pictures production, adapted from a book by Garland Roark, is loaded with all the gaudy trinkets of an exotic adventure tale – windjammers, shipwrecks, pearl diving, tiki gods, hula dancers, murder, intrigue, hints of the supernatural, and deadly cephalopods. But Wake of the Red Witchhas a peculiar atmosphere that distinguishes it from the sprawl of such tales made in Hollywood back in the day, including obvious precursor Reap the Wild Wind (1942). Loaded with literary ideas, it also fits rather neatly into the late ‘40s noir zone it was released amidst, with an emphasis on antiheroes, psychological fixations and manias, and fascist power expressed through capitalist will, as well as unusual structuring that convyes a densely layered sequence of events and motives. Director William Ludwig had been making films since the silent era: he handled several films starring Wayne, including WW2 actioner The Fighting Seabees (1944) and the much clunkier anti-commie thriller Big Jim McLain (1952), whilst his last feature work was The Black Scorpion(1957), an occasionally overripe monster movie that nonetheless has an inky, effectively nightmarish texture. The first half-hour of this film is particularly odd, as borderline-Sadean ship captain Rall (Wayne) supervises a punishment devised to chastise anyone who fights on board his vessel: the two quarrellers are forced to pound each-other to bloody pulps.
When mate Rosen (Gig Young), a hastily signed-on crewman unfamiliar with Rall’s methods, speaks up to end the bout, Rall tests his mettle by threatening to have him locked in the brig. Rall draws him instead into his plot to wreck their ship, the Red Witch, a vessel belonging to the ubiquitous shipping line Batjack. The Red Witch carries a load of gold belonging to the line and its shareholders, and Rall ostensibly plans to return the wreck later and retrieve the treasure. To pull off this crime, Rall and Rosen conspire to fool another senior member of the crew, solid company man Mr. Loring (Jeff Corey), about their position. As intended, the Red Witch crashes onto a reef and sinks beneath the waves. Rosen soon finds that he’s signed up for a far more tangled melodrama than he thought. Rall’s conspiracy brings down the shadow of Batjack’s wrath upon them. The company’s sinister owner Mayrant Sidneye, has a reputed penchant for malevolent and relentless payback against enemies, and when, at a court of enquiry, Batjack declines to have Rall and Rosen prosecuted for their actions, they’re left to suspect they’re being saved for a more personal and exacting lesson. Rall and Rosen subsist as pearlers and fishermen for months whilst waiting for a chance to return to the wreck, all the while sensing Sidneye’s manifold spies across the South Pacific. Finally, following a chart sold to them purporting to reveal a pearling bed at a remote island, the men find they’ve stepped directly into a well-laid trap arranged by Sidneye (Luther Adler) himself.
The paranoid, cryptic atmosphere of the first third is distinctive, as Batjack is described as an organisation of grand power and menace that can deceive men even within the vast reaches of the Pacific, like some distant precursor to the monolithic organisations of The Parallax View (1974) or Alien(1979), whilst Sidneye is made to seem, in abstract, a figure of Mabuse-like spidery control. This movement resolves with images loaded with lingering, eerie power – the Red Witch sinking silently under the water, a wall of spikes rising from the sea to entrap Rall’s lugger, and Sidneye being carried out of the jungle as a crippled potentate by his native minions, to cluck over Rall’s position with satisfied largesse. Rosen is tantalised by Sidneye’s niece Teleia Van Schreeven (Adele Mara), who warns Rosen about the danger he’s in lest Sidneye’s mood spoil. Sidneye makes a ploy to win Rosen’s loyalty instead, and launches into a lengthy explanation by way of flashbacks as to how he and Rall first met, revealing the deeper purposes behind Rall’s attempt to wound Sidneye and his associates financially. Wake of the Red Witch becomes more conventional here on, but only relatively, as it depicts Rall and Sidneye’s relationship as a kind of lethal romance. Each man embodies qualities the other prizes. Rall has the masculine swagger and rakish gutsiness, Sidneye the readiness to treat anyone and anything as a function of his will and remake the world to suit himself. Of course, a woman was the fulcrum for their love-hate relationship.
In Sidneye’s account, he came across Rall set adrift by annoyed Pacific islanders, a crucified he-man with sharks circling to gnaw the meat from his bones. Rall seduced Sidneye with the promise of riches as he would Rosen, drawing the shipping magnate to another island with the lure of pearls. Angelique (Gail Russell), the daughter of the island’s French governor Desaix (Henry Daniell), became the object of both men’s affections. Rall, believed holy by the islanders but loathed by Desaix, battled the giant octopus that lorded over the pearling bed and killed it, winning a fortune in pearls which he gave to Sidneye in exchange for mastery of the Red Witch. But when Desaix tried to denounce and shoot Rall, Rall socked him and accidentally knocked him into the natives’ ritual pyre, killing him. Unsurprisingly, this destroyed his romance with Angelique, who married Sidneye instead. Teleia later fills Rosen in on some of the details Sidneye judiciously excluded, including that later Rall and Angelique met again and found their love still potent, and finally she withered away under Sidneye’s thumb, dying like Cathy Earnshaw in her interloping lover’s arms. But the men’s resumed warfare still retains a weird exaltation of mutual jealousy and adversarial challenge. A bomb planted to disable the lugger by one of Sidneye’s underlings proves more powerful than Sidneye’s desired end of crippling the boat required: the device destroys the boat, almost killing Rall and the rest of the crew just after Rall has convinced Rosen to stay behind with Teleia. But the crew survive and Rall returns to taunt the almost delighted Sidneye, leading to a climax in which Rall agrees to retrieve the sunken gold from the precariously perched wreck of the Red Witch.
Overtones of Bronte-esque eternal love and morbid passion blend with the more intellectualised approach to the same themes that so compelled D. H. Lawrence, his interest in the complex intersection of primal urge, psychology, and social structure – Sidneye is finally entrapped like Lord Chatterley in a wheelchair as metaphor for impotence before Angelique and Rall’s continuing ardour, wrestling with the same schism between instinct and control, naturalness and artificiality. Rall and Sidneye’s mutual fixation is explicated complete with Teleia’s suggestion that Sidneye remade Rall as an apt pupil in the school of harsh masterdom, echoed in the same way Rall tries to court Rosen for the same ends. Sidneye is less an overtly destructive villain than a man with great gifts for accumulating life’s successes and slowly throttling them, finally reducing himself to crippled husk, whilst Rall achieves veritable demigod status amongst the islanders for conquering the octopus god, and like many a demigod of classical literature has a fatal flaw. Rall’s neurotic propensity for violence, best stoked to a fine pitch when sodden in alcohol, gains him legendary status but also continually sabotages his best gifts and intentions: he cannot operate cool just as Sidneye cannot operate hot. The unexpected complexity of these major characters as individuals contrasts their sharp relief as products of different cultural viewpoints. Rall is natural man, Sidneye a by-product of civilisation, each masters of their own world and bound in conflict and envy to duel in remote places where neither has immediate advantage. Interestingly, Teleia embodies the alternative as product of two worlds. Ludwig casually undercuts a well-worn cliché when Rosen stumbles upon Teleia bathing nude in a tropical lagoon: she emerges totally unconcerned that he copped an eyeful, and later dons full Victoriana ensemble for dining without a blink of dissonance, a female equivalent of Burroughs original concept of Tarzan. She ultimately becomes not prize and pawn of their duel like Angelique but catalyst for understanding them both as strong but failed experiments in human evolution.
The problem with Wake of the Red Witch is closely related to the qualities that make it unusual. The odd structure and the complexities of the drama conflict with basic generic niceties of suspense and thrills. Much of the story unfolds in recounted scenes, which means that the narrative lacks urgency, never quite boiling over with the kind of psychodrama it promises, and there’s a lack of action before a finale that lacks a strong stake. Rall risks his life thanks to his own brinkmanship, in a sequence that filches the last reel of Reap the Wild Wind without the elements which made that conclusion exciting. Wake of the Red Witch is too rich to be a merely diverting piece of cine-exotica, but on the other hand, it’s too busy to become a truly effective psychological narrative on the level of Val Lewton’s The Ghost Ship (1943), to which it does feel spiritually connected. The result is left perched between two poles, of paperback novel romantic adventure and genuinely Conradian saga of interior drama revealed through exterior travails, whilst Ludwig’s evident gifts for striking vision-mongering is only present in fits and spurts. But the film builds to another haunting shot, of Wayne’s face distorting through registers of death-terror and dreamy acceptance as his diving helmet fills with water, an almost Kenneth Anger-like moment of perfervidly numinous imagery. Sidneye rises to his feet Strangelove-like in his shock at losing his spurring antagonist/devotee, whilst one sea salt murmurs “She finally got him!”, meaning the ruined ship claimed her betraying master. The last moments aim for Wagnerian horizons as Rall and Angelique are glimpsed riding the wispy spirit of the Red Witch for the setting sun. Wayne gives a good performance, working up something of the same irate, gnarled intensity that would later serve him so well on The Searchers (1956) when Rall is gripped by his irrational side. The project must have left a mark on the actor, who went on to name his production company Batjac. Meanwhile, according to legend, the giant octopus Wayne fights here was the same one Edward D. Wood Jr stole for use in Bride of the Monster(1953)…
