White Cargo (1942) - film review

In 1910, Harry Witzel is the overseer of a rubber plantation in Africa.  When his assistant is taken back to England, he gives his replacement, Longford, a cool reception.  Witzel predicts that within a year Longford will go the same way, driven out of his mind by the monotonous work and the torrid climate.  He also warns him about a native woman, Tondelayo, who has made a habit of bewitching white men with her exotic beauty.  Longford naturally laughs this off but soon receives an unexpected visit from Tondelayo.  She is every bit as alluring as Witzel implied and he is utterly powerless against her seductive charms...

One of the sillier jungle-based melodramas that were very much in vogue in the 1940s, White Cargo’s main appeal is the mouth-watering sight of screen beauty Hedy Lamarr frolicking about in cocoa butter and very little else.  Playing fast and loose with the Hollywood censors, the film’s screenwriters and director exploit Lamarr’s overt sexuality and some pretty flagrant double entendre to reward audiences with what is really little more than soft core porn.  When the pouting Lamarr offers to make tiffin twenty times a day, it clearly isn’t brewing an hourly cuppa that she has in mind...  The film was particularly well-received by men in the armed services, something that prompted its star to comment that, despite the misgivings she had for the role, she at least did her bit for the war effort.

Although horribly dated and painfully static (you would never think it was adapted from a stage play...), White Cargo is worth watching to appreciate just how much attitudes towards race and female exploitation have changed in the half century since it was made.  It is hard to know which would now cause greater offence, the flagrant racism (no black woman is worthy of a white man) or its disgusting misogynism (Tondelayo is sanguine in her belief that the recipe for a happy marriage is a regular beating from her husband).  In true colonialist style, the down-trodden natives are portrayed as thick, lazy and treacherous - just why can they not follow simple instructions given to them in plain English?  Yuk, yuk and thrice yuk - were things ever as bad as this?

If you can somehow make allowance for its offensive racist and misogynistic undertones, the film is surprisingly entertaining, probably because it feels like a cack-handed spoof of a tacky film noir.  White Cargo at least has a respectable cast which includes Walter Pidgeon (one of Hollywood’s biggest stars at the time), Richard Carlson (the handsome male lead in such films as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and It Came from Outer Space (1953) and character actor Frank Morgan (best known as The Wizard of Oz in the 1939 film of that name).  Pidgeon and Carlson may give the film its backbone but it is inevitably the scantily clad Hedy LaMarr who dominates the precedings, oozing so much sex appeal that you can see it pouring off the screen in great steamy rivulets.  And when she gets into erotic dance mode and starts cracking that whip... gulp.  Excuse me, I need to take a cold shower.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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