Hurricane! (1979)

[akiratubo]

The setting is some islands in the South Pacific, or somewhere, I dunno, during the 1920s.  Jason Robards is a Naval officer overseeing U.S. interests in the island chain.  His teenage thirty-something daughter (Mia Farrow) comes to visit.  He pairs her off with an officer under his command, then makes a big show of interrupting them any time they threaten to get more intimate than holding hands.  The island's chief dies and his son, whom I'll call Keanu because the actor reminds me of him, is promoted to chief.  Mia starts noticing Keanu and decides she wants into his pants.  The fact that doing so would p**s of her smothering father is surely a factor.  Keanu is semi-resistant, and then Mia plays semi-hard to get when he finally shows interest, but they eventually introduce their reproductive organs to each other.  It does indeed p**s of Jason Robards.  Like, homicidally p**ses him off.  Fortunately for him, Keanu is implicated in a murder, so Jason Robards decides to capture and execute him without a trial.  It will satisfy his bloodlust, demoralize those uppity brown people, and prove that white man's law is absolute, all in one stroke.  However, that titular hurricane FINALLY decides to happen ...

The material aspects of Hurricane! are very good.  The climactic hurricane is well handled and the effects mostly come off great.  The rest of the production values are also quite high and the director of photography sure knows how to take a pretty picture.  Unfortunately, a plodding pace and an uncommitted cast sink the movie.  Jason Robards is trying, but only a little.  He sets himself on "a***ole" and just kind of coasts along.  I doubt the guy playing Keanu was actually an actor.  He was probably a model or athlete who got cast because someone thought he looked good without a shirt.  George W. Bush Timothy Bottoms plays the guy who is initially paired off with Mia but the only real impression he makes is, well, looking exactly like George W. Bush.  Mia Farrow is not "bad", per se, but her role did not suit her.  The character was obviously written to be in her teens or about twenty, at most.  Mia Farrow was in her mid-30s when this movie was made.  Now, that's fine.  It wouldn't have been hard to tweak the character a little and make her a sheltered, stunted woman trapped in a cruelly extended adolescence by her overbearing father.  Nobody did this, though, and Mia is stuck trying to pretend to be a naive, young girl.

I'll be honest, here.  The only reason I watched this movie was because I read that some of the hurricane footage was stolen and used at the beginning of Crocodile, and I wanted to see if I could spot it.  I didn't, because none of the footage was used in Crocodile.  The internet lied to me.

[BoyScoutKevin]

I have never seen this, so I can't comment on the quality of it, but . . .?! it has a history of being a very troubled production, which may be one of the reasons it was both a critical and box office failure.

Of course, it was a remake of the 1937 film, which included a cast of . . .

Dorothy Lamour -- Jon Hall -- Mary Astor -- C. Aubrey Smith -- Thomas Mitchell -- Raymond Massey -- Jerome Cowan -- and John Carradine, etc.

Direction by John Ford. Screenplay by Dudley Nichols with Ben Hecht doing some not credited work on it, and, of course based on the novel of the same title by Nordhoff and Hall, who are probably best known for their novel "Mutiny on the Bounty," which was also made into a film.

I have seen the 1937 version on TV, and it is everything you can expect with a cast, director, and screenwriter like that.