Customer Reviews

Made in Paradise: Hollywoods Films of Hawaii & the South Seas

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While not a book to be read from cover to cover, this is a fun book to browse. The book is like a Roger Ebert guide to American movies and TV shows either filmed on location or about the Pacific. I'm probably not objective, as the Pacific and old movies are both hobbies of mine, but I keep this book close to my cable box. The book is fairly comprehensive in covering all movies made in or about the Pacific. Reyes is non-critical about the movies he profiles. The pictures are worth the price all by themselves.

First things first. The first 190 pages of "Made in Paradise" are illiterate. The second half of the book is literate though hardly well-written.

Otherwise, this is just a pastiche, full of the kind of goo that has left the millions craving more since the earliest days of Photoplay. If you watch South Seas movies, then here is a mess of information about them, with lots of pictures. The information is not very reliable

Reyes manages to make this harmless excursion obnoxious by several PC agendas. One is about using Latins to portray Polynesians, or Swedes to portray Chinese. Somehow, we never hear any objections when Poles or Hungarians change their screen names and pass as WASPs. So tiresome.

Then there is an embarrassing passage in which Reyes has the excellent idea of correcting a few of the many mistakes, misapprehensions and downright falsehoods that Hollywood flogs in its wares. The execution, however, fails, as Reyes inserts new myths for old.

But what about the movies? The text accompanying each film is sometimes embarrassingly short, which might not be Reyes' fault, especially for the very early films. When it is fuller, there is not much depth. He rattles off the publicity material, sometimes quotes a review if he can find one and adds a superficial fact or misstatement of fact from time to time.

Not much depth here, but we hardly expect it. We do, however, get a pretentious introduction in which Reyes, with the air of pulling a solid-gold rabbit out of a hat, attempts to establish that there exists a "South Seas genre" of moviedom. Conceded.

Back to the films. Most of them were crap, but some were especially cheap and tawdry crap. Yet, quite a few aspired to being more: from the record-setting price tag of the underwater bomb 'Waterworld," to the record-setting grosses of 'Jurassic Park."

South Seas movies, the genre, attracted many of Hollywood's most celebrated if not always most capable performers. The good ones were often underused.

My particular interest is films made on Maui. Of these, "The Devil at 4 O'clock" had a top director, Mervyn LeRoy, and a standout cast of Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra; to act in a story that would have embarrassed a dime novelist. The special effects of flowing lava were also comical.

No good movie has yet been made on Maui. Reyes avoids the skin flicks that are made, without fanfare, on the backwoods island of Molokai, which is part of Maui County, and this is explicable.

Oddly, however, he fails to list "Rainbow Bridge," a concert film with Jimi Hendrix. The film has a sort of incomprehensible plot, so it is not just a filmed concert. Besides, in his TV section, Reyes lists a number of filmed concerts.

Also missing is perhaps my favorite bad Maui movie, which has been released under several titles including "Just Tell Me That You Love Me." This was the debut of Robert Hentges, although he understandably does not list it on his filmography.

Can I say anything good about this book? Well, it's handy to look stuff up in, and the utility of a book has not been superseded by the ease of looking up film stuff on the Internet. Reading through all of it is painful but does allow one to pick out certain connections that you don't find via a Google search. And his comparatively lengthy discussion of "Goodbye Paradise" is welcome. This was the first (and almost the last) independent theatrical film made in the islands, and it is a small gem, with a real story about real people. There's hardly a palm tree in it.