Macao [1952] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

Customer Reviews:

Interesting exotic film noir featuring a sultry Jane Russell.......2007-08-08

This begins with a chase scene: a man in a white suit and white hat running, being chased by some thugs and a sinister Chinese guy with a knife. The man stops and looks back, forgetting Satchel Paige's dictum: "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you." They are in fact only dozen yards or so behind. But he starts running again and miraculously they are now further behind! (Typical chase scene camera work resulting in illogic. But never mind.) He ducks around a corner and hides. One of the thugs pauses, turns and sees him, which gives the man in the white suit a chance to knock him off his feet with a swift uppercut. Then he runs off in the direction he had turned. I was thinking how much he would be ahead of everybody by now if he had just kept running.

Chase scene ends with a knife thrown at him landing in the middle of his back. He's a cop from New York. Dead. Somehow this scene reminded me of something from Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

Next scene is much better. Jane Russell as Julie Benson is in a cabin room on a passenger ship with a touristy kind of guy who's dancing, if you can call it that. He wants more than dancing. Julie pushes him away. He won't take no for an answer. She takes off a high heel and throws it at him. He ducks and the high heel flies out the window and hits Robert Mitchum who's playing an adventurer named Nick Cochran who just happened to be walking by. Boy meets girl, cute.

After a fashion he rescues the lady in distress. She's a hard talking, sultry babe with attitude. He wants to continue the party after knocking the masher out, but Julie isn't interested. So he takes her and kisses her. Very manly. She still isn't interested and tells him to beat it.

He does, but some time later he notices that his wallet is missing. We see her take out the dough and toss the wallet overboard. A few minutes later she meets up with William Bendix playing a global traveling salesman named Lawrence C. Trumble. Of course we know this is an elaborate disguise and he is somebody other than who he pretends to be. The "C" stands for Cicero, he later tells Nick, "but don't tell anybody." Trumble makes with the pleasantries, but Julie brushes him off. He tells her what he's selling. One thing she likes is nylons. He gives her a free pair, "no strings attached." She takes off her old nylons right there on the deck, tossing them overboard, one by one. Nick manages to be passing on the deck beneath and catches one of them as she puts on the new nylons. Later she asks, "Did you get a nice view?"

It's Macao, 36 miles from Hong Kong. It's hot. People are smoking and smuggling and gambling, and ex-pats who are stranded tend to make friends quickly. Naturally there's romance with Julie falling for Nick and vice versa, but some misunderstandings come between them. One has to do with Margie, played by the always intriguing Gloria Grahame, who, unlike Jane Russell, actually has an Oscar statue for her work in The Bad and the Beautiful from 1952, which, alas, I haven't seen. Seems that Margie would like to get her mitts on Nick and so manages at the urging of her boss, who owns a gambling nightclub, to make it seem like Nick bedded her down, or vice-versa, as you like.

This reminded me a bit of Casablanca (1942) and To Have and Have Not (1944) in that we have an American in an exotic locale with a dame in a joint amid some nefarious goings-on. As in To Have and Have Not, Jane Russell, like Lauren Becall, does some singing. One of the numbers is "Make It One for My Baby and One More for the Road," which she does very well. Russell hails from a time when movies featured full-figured babes, and she was one of the best. Sexy, shapely and not a bad actress, Russell melted a few hearts in her time.

In a way "Macao" is almost a parody of Far Eastern intrigue films, which might account for the slight Abbott and Costello feel. I think this may come from the fact that Josef von Sternberg began as director, but Howard Hughes fired him and had Nicholas Ray finish up. Anyway, this moves right along and there is some nice chemistry between the two stars. Personally I got a kick out of seeing them both again after all these years.

Bottom line: a kind of film noir done with atmosphere and a lot of snappy one-liners. Definitely worth seeing.

Average customer rating:

Macao [1952] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
Starring: Robert Mitchum
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: 141984430X
Release Date: 2007-01-23

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