Howdy folkses! Here it is July already and we're only just now getting around to our first review. It seems we've cultivated so many other laudable virtues in our arsenal of appropriacy here at MMT that we've simply got no room left for punctuality. Still, we're all mighty glad you're here, and if you're reading this it means you're alive and participating in another miserable year, so huzzah! You didn't perish in a global catastrophe, take a fatal fall from a cliff or get hit by a speeding Greyhound bus. You weren't asphyxiated in a freak wallpapering accident, nor did a confused goat mistake you for a bale of hay, flay off all your skin with its teeth and leave you to expire in the mud like a landed cod. No errant grand piano fell from a skyscraper to mash you into well-tempered, finely tuned people-paste. Your pancreas was not punctured by a collision with a near-sighted heron whilst you floated peacefully down the Amazon River on an inner tube, and you were you certainly not thenceforth consumed in a wild frenzy by starving piranhas. Likewise, you didn't macro-dose on twenty-eight sessions' worth of therapeutic ketamine and eagerly leap into an over-cranked woodchipper, reciting "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold backwards and wearing only a hot pink thong and a wistful smile. I think you'll agree these are all valid reasons to celebrate being alive even if the world does seem to be completely going to shit.
Speaking of shit, it makes good fertilizer, and we sure do go through a lot if it this time of year. Spring sprang and Summer usurped it, the traffic cones are in bloom and nature's gladsome abundance is just a-burstin' and a-bustin' out all over. Boomin', burstin', and bustin', too is the elaborate flora of our famous Million Monkey Towers rooftop gardens, a National Historic Register site long celebrated for the breadth and variety of its foliage and the eerie splendor of its eclectic architecture. Designed in neoclassical and neogothic motifs by the famous architect and horticulturist Jebidiah Augustine Winthorpe, it was added to our roof in the mid-1930's, approximately a decade after construction of the building was completed.
Bankrolled by Winthorpe himself, along with his business partner Samuel D. Kent, the space was envisioned as "a unique venue for fine dining and light entertainment" (according to contemporary advertisements) and included three Michelin Star-rated restaurants, several cunning water features and a conservatory theater with a retractable glass roof. It was an instant hit with the local upper-crust, who enjoyed musical revues, outdoor dining and lavish costume balls hosted by the best-known luminaries of the day. Sadly, about a year and half after it opened the mysterious disappearance of a wealthy patron, who'd left his table to enjoy a cigar on the east observation platform and was never seen again, irreparably stained its reputation.
The gentleman in question, one Maxwell Barnabus Shillington was a local businessman with broad financial interests, including stakes in commercial equipment manufacturing, film distribution and overseas agriculture. Apposite to this last point, the investigation into his vanishment revealed that he held a one third interest in a Haitian plantation co-owned by Messrs. Winthorpe and Kent. The investigation was thorough and well-covered by an eager press. The two remaining partners seemed to be as honestly befuddled as everyone else, yet despite absolutely no evidence of foul play having been discovered in the matter, the newspapers went wild in speculating over various nefarious conspiracies. There were wild accusations, framed as tantalizing "what ifs" to deftly skirt the boundaries of libel, and despite the duo's protestations to the contrary, the reading public became firmly and unshakably convinced that Winthorpe and Kent had somehow done away with their third wheel of a partner and secreted his body away in some out-of-the-way place where it would never be found. It never was, and following a short-lived boom in business, spurred on by morbid curiosity and the flash-in-the-pan novelty of the affair, patronage at the gardens slowed to a trickle and the venue was forced to close.
Fast forward to about a month ago, when Intern Hector and I were performing some routine maintenance, removing and replacing the grout from the marble obelisk at the center of the topiary maze. It's a sizable ornament, twenty-one feet high and six by six feet at the base, with a huge, door-sized panel featuring a beautifully detailed bas relief of native Haitian workers harvesting sugar cane on the grounds of the very plantation house that had provided much of the capital to make these wonderful gardens a reality. The cleaning process turned out to be a longer job than we'd anticipated, and the sun was already low on the horizon as I scraped away the crumbling lime and clay in the crevices surrounding the panel. As I reached the last of it at the bottom left of the frame my tool broke completely through the grout and got stuck in the hole it had created, and as I worked it back and forth to try to loosen it Hector and I heard a deep, resonant, metallic click. Suddenly we heard the scraping of stone on stone and the entire panel swung slowly open on some cleverly hidden hinge.
"Good gods!" cried Hector, his gruff, feline bellow suddenly trailing away to a frantic, guttural whisper. "Look at that!"
I raised my eyes and beheld a most shocking and gruesome sight. Propped up inside the cramped, cobwebbed chamber of the obelisk interior was the pale grey corpse of a man dressed in a dusty sack-suit and mold-spotted bowler hat, the crumpled stub of a half-smoked cigar clenched tightly between his morbidly grinning teeth. In his hands was clutched some sort of wickerwork voodoo fetish or ornament adorned with the faded feathers of some exotic bird, affixed to its center with frayed and blackened twine. A watch fob dangled between the pockets of his striped vest, with the watch itself exposed through a hole where some long-dead moth had feasted on the fabric in the silent darkness. Upon closer examination I could clearly see etched into its surface the initials "M.B.S."
The police were dispatched immediately, and a faded business card found in the unfortunate gentleman's wallet confirmed that he was, indeed Mr. Maxwell Barnabus Shillington, late of Indianapolis by way of Los Angeles and Saint-Domingue, Haiti. As the coroner's assistant, a wizened old black man with a gold tooth and a teardrop tattoo, wheeled the body towards the elevator he stopped to point at the wicker fetish, now sealed in an evidence bag and set on the ground between a half-decayed copy of a 1936 "Film Distributor's Weekly" and the unfortunate victim's watch. "Ouanga!" he cried, pointing down at the fetish with one hand and frantically crossing himself three times with the other, and loudly kissing his thumb with each pass over his heart. As he turned and hurried away affrightedly, I craned my neck to get a better look at the thing, but it was an advertisement poking through a browned and brittle page of the trade magazine that caught my eye instead...and that's how I came to learn of today's featured film.
At its core, Ouanga is a sordid tale of limerent passion gone awry, of the simmering mania of love denied that churns and festers within the heart that carries it...and the lengths to which a spurned lover might go to control and punish the object of their spurned attentions. It's also about voodoo, which as you all surely know, is a reliable cinematic bellwether for sensitive, well-reasoned and respectful explorations of complex racial dynamics.
With its then-scandalous themes of miscegenation and black revenge Ouanga was deemed too unseemly for audiences of the time and it initially failed to find a distributor. The film would likely have rotted in a vault somewhere completely forgotten but for a fortuitous circumstance that made its brief release five years later seem suddenly timely and reasonable. Renamed The Love Wanga, the film would be explicitly marketed for its thematic connection to White Cargo, a popular but controversial 1923 stage play in which a white man marries a native black woman. White Cargo reentered the public consciousness in early 1941 when MGM announced they'd acquired the rights for a film adaptation set to star Walter Pidgeon and Hedy Lamarr, and though this somewhat sanitized version would not be released until the following year, Paramount Pictures figured they'd dust off Ouanga, change the title and make a quick buck on White Cargo's pre-production buzz, dumping The Love Wanga onto the "states rights" film circuit to help fill out their distribution quotas.
Ouanga is not overall a good or successful film, but there are a very few surprising nuances and even some degree of fleeting sympathy for the troubled Caribbean beauty at the center of the film's plot. Sadly, these scanty morsels of hope are vastly overshadowed by an abundance of grotesque racial stereotypes and xenophobic tropes of the type you'd likely expect yet would hope to avoid in a mixed-cast exploitation piece from 1936. Despite this, and the mostly awful acting, it's still passably entertaining, due largely to the presence of the fiercely talented Fredi Washington in the lead role. Her visceral performance grounds all but the most absurd elements of the film in a firm emotional reality, which is quite a feat considering some of the ridiculous and demeaning things she's made to say and do.
Washington began her career as a back-up dancer and protege of Josephine Baker, the American-born dancer, singer and actress who became a cultural icon in France during the 1920's and 30's. Baker was a fascinating figure: her erotically charged variety performances captivated audiences and her penchant for walking her pet cheetah Chiquita through the streets of Paris on a lead with a diamond collar evoked both fascination and consternation, creating an air of exotic mystery about her public persona. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, the silent drama Siren of the Tropics (1927), became an early civil rights icon by refusing to perform to segregated audiences (hence her move to and eventual naturalization in France), and even served as an agent for the French resistance during World War II, for which she was awarded the Resistance Medal, the Croix de Guerre and the title of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in her adopted country.
Fredericka Carolyn "Fredi" Washington, a light-skinned Black woman with magnetic screen appeal, proved a worthy successor to Baker's unflinching integrity. She walked away from what by all accounts would have been a lucrative and perhaps even legendary career in Hollywood, giving up vast potential wealth and notoriety in order to uphold her personal principals. Prospects for black actors in Hollywood were fairly grim at the time, with segregation the accepted norm throughout the United States, yet Washington managed to distinguish herself as exceptional even in the earliest of her relative handful of film roles. These included several short subjects in which she played against such jazz luminaries as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, and a compelling turn as Paul Robeson's paramour in the controversial drama The Emperor Jones (1933), a role for which her skin was actually darkened to reassure audiences that their relationship was not interracial. Her most celebrated role came the following year with Imitation of Life (1934), where, ironically, she played a light-skinned Black woman who chooses to deny her roots and pass as white in order to cultivate her career. After that film's critical success, studio executives urged her to pass as white herself, assuring her that with a carefully curated backstory and the power of the Hollywood media machine behind her she could easily be as famous as Joan Crawford or Greta Garbo. Washington, true to her convictions, cringed at the thought of living a lie and flatly refused. She appeared in only two subsequent films over the next two years before abandoning Hollywood and spending the remainder of her acting career in the theater. Ouanga was her penultimate screen outing.
If you came into this film cold, never having seen the posters or having heard anything about it, you might initially be tempted to think it's a documentary, as the first few minutes are a sort of semi-maudlin travelogue about the "simple black folks" who live their "simple black folk lives" in the "simple island nation" where our story takes place. That island nation is Haiti, despite the condescending, whitesplaining narrator trying to convince us otherwise. Now, I'm no expert on Caribbean history, but even I know that it was Haiti that had the plantations, Haiti that had the slaves and indentured labor and Haiti that had the voodoo culture so central to the film's plot, and a simple Google search confirms that Paradise Island, where the filmmakers wish us to believe it takes place, did not have any of these things. Paradise Island is a small islet across the water from Nassau, Bahamas and is today a sprawling resort, but historically it had a more diverse and liberated population than the perpetually exploited denizens of Haiti, some 855 kilometers away. Perhaps the producers just liked the sound of Paradise Island better, or perhaps they had other reasons to change the setting of their film. Perhaps I already know the answer to that, and perhaps I'll get to it when I damn well please.
So, our little docu-prologue leads into the subject of voodoo and the incessant, mesmerizing night-drums played by its mysterious practitioners. The primal call of these drums is so strong, we're told, none of the simple black folk can resist them, and without thought or will or cognition they must amble, dazed and glassy-eyed, into the oppressive night jungle and towards the sacred circle where the sinister, secretive rites will take place.
"They're very musical people."
Within that very circle we join a ritual-in-progress, where we meet a wizened old voodoo priest in a white tunic, some nubile melanic attendants and the stunning, but pitiless, Clelie Gordon, the wealthy native plantation owner whose passion and outrage will set our tale in motion. She performs a provocative dance around a campfire, encircled by swaying supplicants, chanting in unison to some pasty-pale Wonder Bread composer's estimation of how Voodoo music should sound. Clelie twists and shimmies and gyrates provocatively around the fire towards the priest, and there are a couple of nicely framed shots where she appears to be emerging from the flames like some alluring supernatural temptress from the bottom most depths of hell.
I might be a little tempted myself.
When Clelie reaches the Priest, he asks her if she's ready to devote her life to the dark and powerful forces they've summoned, and she boldly asserts that she is. He places around her neck an ouanga (pronounced "wanga") as a charm of protection by the mysterious gods she's now sworn to serve as High Priestess. Ouangas are a genuine part of voodoo practices and are used as charms to both protect and bewitch. Clelie's ouanga takes the form of a small leather pouch, but traditionally they take many forms and serve many purposes.
The Priest cautions Clelie that this charm is her only protection against evil and destruction, and by way of signing her immutable contract with fate she puts her hand to it and replies "Should I lose this, may evil and death come upon me."
The mighty cudgel of foreshadowing.
Now we're in New York. We know it's New York by the aerial stock footage of New York and by a helpful caption informing us that it's New York. The caption further informs us that one Mr. Adam Maynard is just finishing up a trip there wherein he became affianced, and that he's bringing his blushing bride-to-be back to the plantation he owns in Haiti for the happy event of their nuptials. The caption actually specifies that it's in Haiti this time and I wish the damn movie would make up its fucking mind.
Just as quickly as we penetrate saucy old New York, we pull back out, as we now cut to stock footage of a two-funnel ocean liner of moderate size puffing and churning away across the open sea. Clelie is on the ship, decked out in a white fox stole and a form-fitting little black dress, looking hella-hot and skulking about the upper decks, surreptitiously spying on Adam and his fiancee Eve. Yes, they're called Adam and Eve and they're going to live in Paradise, at least according to the lying sack of shit narrator. Make of that what you will, but it's not why they tried to change the setting.
Eve is a plain-Jane Englishwoman of indeterminate age straight out of an East Sussex society page, replete with a slightly masculine face and an uncanny valley stare. Adam himself is no great prize, either, with his doorknob nose and oleaginous sculpted wax face vacillating (depending on the demands of the plot) between a soulless grin and a look of mild gastric discomfort. Neither of them can act their way out of an open door, and the idea that the perfectly poised, physically stunning, iron-willed Clelie would lose her shit and her sanity over their pairing is utterly absurd.
They've got the rizz of government cheese.
Clelie fondles her ouanga and looks on in disgust as the two bland, flavorless lovebirds coo over each other and daydream about their rosy and lucrative future of exploiting impoverished natives for personal gain. After an awkward, yet mercifully brief 1930's Hollywood smash kiss, which brings to mind a couple of sacks of oatmeal colliding in slow motion, Eve heads off to freshen up and wash the stink of the terrible dialogue out of her mouth. Adam has no such compunctions about the halting, treacly nonsense he's just been forced to say, and proudly promenades around the deck in a stupor of pretended love, secure in the comforting knowledge that this would be his last acting role for thirty-eight years.
Clelie, meanwhile circles the deck in the opposite direction and orchestrates a "chance" meeting, making like she just happens to have gone to New York when he did and just happened to be going back to Haiti on the same ship. Adam pretends to be glad to see her, muttering a slightly constipated "I didn't expect to see you here," but Clelie gets straight to the point and flatly admits that she followed him from home. The rest of the conversation is an awkward mess, at least for us modern, enlightened folks who don't think The Dukes of Hazard was supposed to be a documentary. Adam repeatedly rebuffs her entreaties of love by reminding Clelie that she's black and Clelie repeatedly counters that she and Adam can still be together despite the "barrier of blood" that separates them because she's so pale. He admits that she'd been wonderful to him over the past two lonely years, when as the owners of neighboring plantations they'd been thrown together as peers, and it's clear from the subtext their relationship had gone beyond strictly platonic, despite the disparity of race and the social mores that might otherwise have discouraged their coupling. Adam's position essentially boils down to "I like a little brown sugar every now and again, but I won't put a ring on it." Clelie's position is "I could easily pass as white and the world would never know of the transgression, and you'd better let me ride you like a prize stallion at the Royal Ascot...or else." In the end he firmly asserts that he plans to wed his frumpy white dumpling and make doughy white babies, and that he and Clelie can never hope to be together because she belongs with her "own kind."
Wrong answer, honky.
Other reviewers have commented on the indignity of Clelie's petitions here--as well as her perfect Hollywood diction despite her supposedly being a native islander. She goes so far as to get on her knees and beg, and even promises to be Adam's slave if only he'll take her back. It's some wince-inducing stuff, to be sure, but then again, the entire film is predicated on the "horrors" of interracial relationships, and that absolutely should make us wince.
Clelie's behavior here is needlessly pathetic and contradicts what we'll subsequently learn of her, especially considering the lengths to which she'll be willing go to impose her will on Adam and everyone else in her circle. I'd like to think her supplication here is a ruse, a sly but ultimately futile attempt to have her way with Adam without resorting to the extreme measures of supernatural intervention, and it makes the viewing experience immeasurably better if I lie to myself in this way, though the intent of the filmmakers was more likely meant to portray her as naive, obsessed and unbalanced. This is at odds with the way Washington tries to play her, successfully more often than not, as strong, smart and capable of committing any outrage to get what she legitimately believes she deserves, and the movie's biggest mistake is in trying to convince us she's not what Washington wants her to be. Her sudden change of demeanor from timorous and yielding to grim and determined only serves to reenforce this, as she ominously warns her pasty paramour that should he refuse her advances "something might happen" to prevent his marriage. Adam is taken off-guard by her calm, simmering menace. He silently backs away from her and cautiously departs the scene, her portentous death-glare still rippling through the milky curds of his cottage cheese brain.
Now we cut to Adam's "negro manservant" in his flawless white uniform, shooting dice on the bed of "Massa's" state room.
"Papa needs a new pair of shoes...and better representation!"
This is Jackson, one half of the stereotypical comic relief duo who will personify some of the worst racial tropes about African Americans in the entire film. The other half is, not surprisingly, also a servant, a maid in Miss Eve's employ whom we'll meet and be thoroughly embarrassed for shortly. Jackson practices his dice throwing technique, repeatedly rolling sevens in multiple combinations, but quickly scoops up his dice and pretends to be tidying the bedsheets when Adam steps in. His boss sends him over to Eve's state room to get her cool weather wrap from the maid in question.
As Jackson knocks on Eve's door, we see Clelie returning to her own state room right across the hall. She pauses to listen as the maid opens the door and Jackson asks for "Miss Eve's wraps." The maid smiles coquettishly and asks him to come in, and methinks I detect a little sum'n sum'n may be going on between them.
Subtle though it may be.
This is Susie, the second half of our comic relief. She proceeds to flirt with Jackson, then asks him if he realizes they're all going to live in a creepy, spooky, voodoo-ridden land of heathens and sorcery. Jackson says he doesn't cotton to this kind of talk. He's a sophisticated New Yorker, wise to the ways of the world and incredulous of superstition. In Harlem, he says, they eat Voodoo for breakfast. Susie leans in and gives him a playful wink, declaring "I ain't afraid of no Voodoos if you is along, big boy!" He's obviously enjoying the attention, but he still sternly rebuffs her advances, telling her "Keep that sugar to yourself...I don't truck with no women!" Meanwhile Clelie is still standing in the hall, listening through the open door and making mental notes on how to turn their stalled romance to her personal advantage.
When Jackson returns with the wrap, Adam asks what took him so long. He blames Susie and her voodoo talk, and Adam sternly retorts that if Jackson gets involved with that stuff, he'll fire his black ass and ship him straight back home to Harlem. No, suh, says Jackson. He ain't afraid of it, he ain't interested in it, and he ain't never bringing up the subject again. When Adam leaves with the wrap Jackson slips a rabbit's foot out of his pocket and rubs it a few times, smiling with satisfaction at his own personal anti-Voodoo protection.
He'll be rubbing something else if Susie gets her way, and he'll need a different kind of protection, too.
Back at Eve's state room, Clelie has lured Susie back to her cabin on the pretense that she can't get hold of the stewardess and needs some help loosening the buckle on her shoe, which to me seems suspiciously like a white people sort of problem. As Susie crouches at her feet, Clelie says she'd walked past her door earlier and couldn't help but overhear what they'd been saying about Voodoo and offers to prepare a love ouanga for her to get Jackson to fall for her. In exchange, of course, Susie would have to do something for her, the nature of which she'll reveal at some later time.
"Watchu talkin' 'bout Willis?"
Susie slowly stands and asks Clelie "Is you a Voodoo?" and emphatically vows that she don't want nothing to do with any black magic. "You needn't be frightened," Clelie responds, "unless you refuse to do what I ask." Susie backs away fearfully as Clelie slowly advances towards her, eyes wide and staring intensely. The poor, defenseless maid feels her free will melt away, mesmerized by the sinister power of this beautiful but dangerous devil of a gal.
We jump cut now to the arrival dock in Haiti, where Jackson is leaning down to place some luggage in a car. As he does so, Susie surreptitiously pins a small wicker fetish to his coat.
"Why, it's all but invisible!"
Further down the dock and beside another fancy car stand Adam, Eve and Aunt Sarah, the last of which is there to chaperone her niece and assure that neither hanky nor panky takes place before the wedding. Also present is a fellow named Lestrange, Adam's overseer at the plantation. Lestrange is played by Sheldon Leonard, a character actor who began his career in 1934 and continued to appear in guest roles on television into the early 1990s. He was even more successful as the producer of such classic series as The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68), The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66) and Gomer Pyle: USMC (1964-69). You might also remember him as Nick the Bartender in It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
"Look, boys! I'm handin' out wings!"
As Lestrange climbs into the driver's seat he notices Clelie debarking from the ship in the distance, a sight that gives him no small degree of agitation. In fact, so distracted is he by it that he nearly strips the gears putting the roadster into drive, earning him a sharp rebuke from his boss. He drives away with the second car following close behind, and soon they all arrive at Adam's expansive plantation. A gaggle of white linen-clad servants step out to meet them and quickly set to unloading the first car of its luggage. When that's done the second car pulls up and the driver gets out to help Susie and Jackson out of the back seat. He notices the ouanga on Jackson's coat, points it out to him and explains what it is. Jackson, despite his previous bold remarks, fidgets in panic like he's got a wasp on him. When he finally plucks the ouanga off the coat he tosses it nervously back and forth between his hands like a hot potato, then throws it over his left shoulder and shouts "mumbo jumbo!" to break its curse. You see, all of this is quite funny because he'd claimed previously that he isn't afraid of voodoo, but...get this...he actually is afraid of Voodoo.
That's comedy 101 there.
With this allegedly humorous interlude at an end, we now rejoin Clelie as she steps out of her own rather modest plantation house and walks to the thatched-roof outbuilding where her old Priest pal does the voodoo he do do so well. Clelie explains that her attempts to persuade Adam to return to her have failed, and that the wedding between he and the white woman will be in three days. Priest Guy crosses his arms like a badass dojo master and opines, "Much can happen in this time." He orders his assistant to fetch his drum so he can hammer out some sick beats and plot his next nefarious move.
Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothin' to fuck with.
Clelie returns home to find Lestrange waiting for her. He tells her he knows she followed his master to New York, and that she's crazy to believe a white man could ever really love her. She counters with her determination that if she can't have Adam no one else will have him either. After all, on the outside, she notes, she's every bit as white as Eve...and by way of demonstration she breathlessly tears open the first couple of buttons on her blouse to reveal the expanse of milky skin on her neck and chest. It's all well above her a-cup niblets, mind you, but this was 1936, so it's plenty enough skin to get Lestrange all hot and wiggly. He pantingly proclaims that it doesn't matter how white she looks, she's still black and she belongs with her own people.
Well, what he actually says is, "You're black...like me!" and honest to God I just about spat out my tea, because I'd had no idea up to this point that Lestrange wasn't supposed to be a white New York Jew with a slight tan.
It's called "range."
It turns out the reason he's so damned interested in who it is Clelie wants to schtup is not out of loyalty to his boss. It's because who she wants to schtup isn't him. He grasps her roughly around the waist, pulls her towards him and kisses her. At first, she yields, and as he declares his love, her resolve to wreak vengeance on Adam weakens. For a fleeting instant she quavers and seems ready to succumb to Lestrange's earnest entreaties, but then she hears the Priest begin his hypnotic drumming...a timely reminder that she has already committed herself to a darker path, no matter the personal cost.
"I smell corned beef."
Clelie pushes Lestrange away, asserting that nothing shall come between her and her destiny. She also shouts, "I hate you, you black scum!" Which I think we can all agree is a very hurtful and unkind thing to say, even to a white New York Jew with a slight tan. Lestrange counters that just as she won't let anyone else have Adam, he won't let anyone else have her...in fact he says he's prepared to kill her to prevent it.
TL/DR: their little chat didn't go too well.
Now we're ready for another long night of Voodoo-ing, but of a lighter, more social sort. More like a native hootenanny or a jungle rave. As the drums beat their entrancing tattoo into the oppressive air, the villagers assemble their sacred circle and the friskier among them begin to dance. There's a random, sultrily bored looking woman leaning against a post just outside the circle who gets a rather clumsy, dropped-in close-up of the ham-fisted, telegraphing future action type, so we know something will happen involving her and her carefully affected disinterest sometime within the next few minutes of screen time.
She's sleepy from all the ennui.
Next, we cut back to Clelie's house, where Susie is in her snazzy going out dress and eagerly awaiting her replacement ouanga so she can have another go at snaring Jackson. Clelie gives it to her, and instead of something she's to pin to Jackson's coat, it's a pouch with powder she's supposed to blow in his face. The proverbial rent is coming due, however, and Clelie also gives her a small round box with instructions to pour the contents into Eve's purse. Susie is afraid, but she's also jonesing for Jackson's johnson, so she agrees. She heads outside to find him in his own snazzy going out suit, impatiently waiting for her to get done whatever lady things she's been doing inside and get to getting on with their night off. He's being a bit heavy handed with the devil-may-care rudery and generally acting like he's much hotter shit than he has any right to presume himself to be, and she's being all sassy and flippant pretending she doesn't care.
We briefly cut back to the Voodoo rave party, for no other reason than to provide an ironic contrast, via jump cut, between the frenzied, feral and viscerally exciting rhythm of the "savages'" music and the smooth, dulcet tones of a "sophisticated" easy listening combo of uniformed natives playing a tastefully modern little dance number for an assembled throng of wealthy white colonials from the neighboring plantations...and boy-howdy are those crackers lapping that shit up.
White-people tested, White-people approved.
A reflectively pale, tuxedo-clad old geezer pipes up with, "sounds like the worst sort of Voodoo, when the blacks plot a special sort of revenge." They'll get a fresh corpse, he explains, then steal some clothes from the person they want to curse, then dress the corpse in the stolen clothes and hide it someplace in the jungle. The object of the curse will slowly go mad looking for it, and unless they get their outfit back, they'll "die in awful agony."
"Anyway, congratulations on your engagement. I'm sure you'll both be very happy."
I should probably mention that as Mr. Exposition is telling us all this, we see some slow-motion footage of Lestrange sneaking out of Clelie's house, clutching the very dress she was wearing when she called him "black scum" earlier that afternoon. Call me a pedant if you must, but it seems like an important detail.
Eve is naturally freaked right the fuck out by the morbid exotica of the old fart's tale, but Adam pats her hand paternally and tells her it's all right, darling, it's just stuff and nonsense and you should be a brave girl and don't worry your pretty head over such wild talk. Mr. Exposition takes offense at this dismissive attitude of his well-reasoned opinion. He haughtily ejaculates "Oh, you'll find out!" then storms off to mop his fevered brow and change his outrage diaper.
Back at the jungle rave Suzie and Jackson have just arrived, and the horny Harlem lothario immediately shoots a broad smile at the random bored woman who got the close-up two scenes ago, a fact which does not go unnoticed by his jealously infatuate companion. He then saunters over to a table where a couple of guys are throwing dice, puts down his scratch and puts on some swagger. Instead of rolling a seven as he did back on the ship, however, he craps out and loses his hard-earned coin. He's clearly embarrassed, but bravely shrugs it off as Susie pulls him away to join the dance.
Once they get their groove on Bored Lady makes her move, slithering in to dance with him and enticing him away from Susie. Jackson, for his part doesn't seem at all displeased by it. They twist and frug and do the bump and the hustle, and Suzi gets all bug-eyed and apoplectic with jealousy. She reaches into her purse, grabs the white powder, pours out a handful and tosses it into his face.
If that's what I think it is he isn't gonna sleep for a week.
Jackson seems rather more perturbed at this than entranced, but the ultimate effect of the spell is, for now at least, left to our imaginations. He brushes the gunk off, scowls at Susie then picks her up at the waist and carries her off into the jungle, possibly for a spanking, a wanking, a tickle with his pickle or some combination of the three, leaving the Bored Lady to return to her post and her angstful meditations.
Back at the white people party Eve, Aunt Sarah, Mr. Exposition and some Other Guy we don't know and won't see again come sauntering off the dance floor. Eve opens her purse, and a little charm falls out made from two burnt matches tied into an "X" with black thread. Other Guy picks it up and Eve takes it from his open palm to examine it. Mr. Exposition urges her to throw it away, calling it "a Voodoo death charm," and she immediately complies, half incredulous, half freaked out by the creepy old dude's constant harping on Voodoo shit. Adam walks over and stands next to her as some distant drums begin to play.
Stolid and matronly Aunt Sarah has had quite enough of these superstitious shenanigans and states her opinion on the matter clearly and succinctly. Adam asks what's going on and Mr. Exposition points at the ouanga on the ground at his bride-to-be's dainty twelve-inch feet. Adam disdainfully kicks the thing away, essentially telling Mr. Exposition to go pound sand and shove his Voodoo bullshit up his expository bunghole, but as the drums get louder a change comes over Eve. She seems short of breath and wobbly on her feet. She suddenly puts her hands to her head and faints into her lover's arms.
We cut to the inside of the plantation house the following morning where Adam has for some inscrutable purpose changed into jodhpurs and riding boots. He paces and sighs and snaps a riding crop against his palm, anxiously awaiting news from a doctor they've called in to evaluate Eve's condition.
Dress for the slide, not the ride.
The Doctor steps out of the sick room, zips up his trousers and gives Adam the bad news: Eve is slipping deeper and deeper into a coma with each passing hour, and with no apparent cause, he has no way of providing an accurate prognosis. His best guess is "some sort of hypnotic suggestion" which makes me immediately question his professional credentials. He doesn't quite believe in black magic, himself, you understand, but he's seen some weird shit since he's been on the island, including a few cases similar to this one. Once the Doctor has stepped out on the verandah for his post-coital cigarette, Adam calls for Susie. She's home and back in her uniform now, so whatever happened with Jackson in the jungle stayed in the jungle. Adam asks whether any of Eve's clothes are missing, and Susie assures her they're not.
"Is she wearing any clothing now? Asking for a friend."
Adam is now coming around to the opinion that there may be something to all this talk of voodoo after all. He slaps his riding crop against his palm one last time, sets his jaw in a dyspeptic scowl and departs. Next, we see him poking around Clelie's Voodoo hut in his little postal service pith helmet. He quietly opens the door and peers inside to see her standing before the altar, just kinda chilin', ya know, chanting praises to her dark lord and wrapping black thread around a doll like she's putting a tiny Voodoo gimp suit on it.
She's like, super into arts and crafts.
Adam stomps in and confronts her, interrupting the ritual before its completion. Clelie gives him an evil sneer, then smiles archly and gives her game away, Bond Villain style. If he'd only been a few minutes later, she assures him, his "white girl would be dead, and no one the wiser." There's a fun couple of absurdly sloppy jump cuts here where we go from Clelie spewing her dastardly plans with the doll in her hand, to Adam's response where he tells her he ought to turn her over to the police with the doll in his hand. We then cut back to Clelie who asks him why he doesn't just go ahead and call the damn police if that's the way he feels about it, and she tosses the doll to him.
Adam realizes he'd sund ridiculous if he went to the police and told them Eve is a sickly invalid and Clelie's a hot, sexy baby who likes to play with dolls. Our cunning Voodoo priestess clearly has the upper hand and goes on the offense, pressing her case for Adam to throw over his frumpish white paramour and come back to black. Surely, she insists, he must now realize the power she has over him, and all will be forgotten if he will only yield to her desires. Knowing what we know now this feels far more sinister and threatening than her speech on the cruise ship, and it would have been so much better for the director to have ended it there, but sadly, she now literally collapses into another pitiful fit of mad pleading and near-masochistic supplication, clutching Adam's waist and pressing her cheek to his crotch, which only makes her appear more pathetic, thirsty and unstable than ever.
"It'll be just like old times! I'll even put the stud back in my tongue!"
During this lamentable exchange our kosher krikher Lestrange has been schlepping around outside the door of the hut with his ears perked up and an insufferable smirk on his punim. No sooner has Adam stormed off to toss the Voodoo doll into a convenient fire pit, Lestrange steps in to drop a heaping helping of "I told you so" on a still-weeping Clelie. Yes, she admits, Adam despises her, despises her because of her blackness, and she's been a fool to believe he could ever truly love her. Lestrange is moved enough by her admission, or possibly by his lustfully swelling loins, to turn simp, assuring her that he didn't mean any of that stuff about wanting to murder her and stuff. "We can still be happy," he pleads, with him as her handsome zeiskeit and her as his loving oitser, but again, she flatly rejects him for the kibitsing paskudnik he is. Her love for Adam has turned resolutely to hatred, and now she thirst-traps only for revenge, emphatically vowing to "show him what a black girl can do!"
"Showing him what a black girl can do is what got you into this mess in the first place."
Adam returns home to find the old Doctor zipping up his pants again and smiling at Eve's sudden and miraculous recovery, doubtless from his custom injection, which, when they compare notes, seems to have occurred at just about the same time as Adam tossed the Voodoo doll into the flames!
Back at the hut, Clelie has summoned the WuTang Priest to inform him that both the powerful ouanga and the mighty doll ritual have failed to achieve her desires, so she's ready to turn her vivacious Voodoo vengeance up to eleven. She orders him to follow her out to the fresh graves of a couple of powerful black men who were declared dead and hastily buried, but who in reality have been drugged and turned into zombies.
The two trundle out to the remote gravesite, where Clelie sits in the shade of a towering palm and makes poor old WuTang do all the digging. Once the caskets are uncovered, propped up and opened, Clelie revives the two men and gives them orders to kidnap Eve and bring her to the old cotton tree at the center of the jungle. She then leaves them in the capable hands of WuTang, who will use his WuTang will and his WuTang whip to ensure the excursion is a WuTang success.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, yes!"
Zombification in the Voodoo faith has been well-documented by anthropologists, although no clinical study has ever proven its efficacy or identified more than a single suspected case that could neither be fully explained nor proven genuine beyond a reasonable doubt. According to custom, the victim was drugged, through means of ingestion, injection or blow dart, with a mixture including puffer fish venom, mystical herbs, human remains, animal parts and a plant-based deliriant called Datura (here at MMT we use genetically modified catnip, but I digress). This mixture allegedly causes a slowing of the bodily functions that is nearly indistinguishable from death. The victim will then be buried, surreptitiously dug up and subjected to a ritual to capture his or her "ti bon ange," the part of the human soul believed to be unique to the individual. The zombie is then revived with a hallucinogenic cocktail known as "the zombi's cucumber," which keeps them in a semi-waking state of hypnotic submission. Zombies were alleged to have been used as slave labor on sugar and banana plantations, and as personal servants for those who had paid to have them revived.
Now that we're all on the same page about it, let's continue.
That evening Adam and Eve are catching up after her misadventure when one of the men shows up and says Lestrange hasn't shown up to debrief the workers and give them instructions for the following day's work. Adam is naturally perturbed by the interruption and somewhat mystified by Lestrange's unaccustomed dereliction. He sends the guy away, saying he'll give the instructions himself. He tells Eve he'll be back shortly and buggers off, leaving her completely alone, in the dark, at the edge of the jungle, which is quite the dereliction in itself considering she's only just recovered from what he knows damn well was an attempt on her life.
As soon as he's gone the eerie and minacious drums begin their direful tattoo, and poor, hapless Eve grasps her head in a creeping madness of fear. A glaze-eyed figure emerges slowly from the darkness before her, and as Eve stands helpless and paralyzed against the trunk of a tree, a muscular black hand reaches around from behind it, covering her mouth and sending her into another of her famous faints.
Yesterday's nightmare is today's Only Fans page.
Aunt Sarah steps out of the house just in time to see "two hulking negroes making away with Eve," an event she reports to Adam in those exact words after raising the alarm. Mr. Exposition happens to have just driven up as well, rather too on-the-nose conveniently to do his expositional thing, and runs over to Aunt Sarah to ask, "Did they look like dead men?" Remarkably, she answers in the affirmative, saying that though she didn't note it at the time, and despite them having been upright and walking and carrying her niece and thirty or more feet away from her in the pitch dark, they did indeed look rather much as if they were dead.
Adam, who had just come from the work camp and found the barracks empty, realizes the drums must portend a Voodoo ritual where eve is to be an unwitting guest. He bolts off into the Jungle, following the sound of the drums and followed after by the impotent shouts of Mr. Exposition, warning him that there's nothing he can possibly do against the forces that have been unleashed.
He's a glass-half-empty guy.
Jackson and Susie have come running outside as well, looking rather worse for wear after their marathon of jive-talk and sweet comic relief lovemaking. They stand wide-eyed and silently attentive as Mr. Exposition explains that the zombies can only be stopped with a silver bullet, then have salt thrown over them to break the spell. Incidentally, the first part is bullocks, but the bit about the salt is almost right. Voodoo tradition holds that if a zombie is fed salt, it would return to its grave and die for good.
"White boy be trippin'!"
Speaking of graves, the zombies carry Eve back to their own little plot, and WuTang has them set her down. He waves a leafy twig around her face, inducing a trance that leaves her terrible awful sleepy, but still mobile and drowsily attentive to his commands. Meanwhile Jackson and Susie have grabbed a cannister of and a shakerful of salt respectively and cautiously light out into the foliage to hunt down the zombies, completely disregarding the part about the silver bullets because even they know damn well that shit is for werewolves.
Adam reaches the graves of the zombies to find them sitting quietly on their own coffins, staring blankly into the inky night. He interrogates them, and receiving no response he picks up WuTang's discarded whip and orders them back to the plantation. Inveterate umbrage taker that I am, I can't let it pass that when Clelie was first resurrecting the zombies she commanded them to take no orders other than her own. Then she sent them off with WuTang with the caveat that he could tell them what to do, which I can grudgingly accept because although she immediately contradicted her previous order, she was providing an overriding order just for that particular instance. Adam, however, has been afforded no such privileges. Still, as soon as he cracks the whip and barks the command, they stand at attention and walk ahead of him back to the house.
A wealthy white colonizer threatening two shirtless black men with a whip was not on my bingo card.
Elsewhere in the jungle our feckless comic twosome is crouching behind some ferns listening to approaching footsteps. As soon as the unknown person passes them into the clearing they leap into action, knocking him to the ground and furiously tossing, shaking and sprinkling salt all over him...and wouldn't you just know it? This isn't a zombie at all, but the driver who'd brought them to the plantation from the dock at the beginning of the movie!
Comedy 102: Humorous Misunderstandings
It turns out the guy is on his way to the Voodoo hoedown, so Jackson and Susie decide to tag along and see if the missing mistress-of-the-house-to-be is there.
We now rejoin Clelie at the rendezvous point awaiting WuTang and their pallid quarry. When they arrive, she sends the old Priest to the circle to complete his preparations and enjoys some quality alone time with her catatonic rival. Clelie compares the captive's arm to her own and shakes her head bitterly that her skin is just as light and pale, yet her birth and heritage have colluded to deny her happiness. She looks upon Eve's plain features and helpless countenance with disgust, and muses aloud that such a timid, wilting flower of a girl could never satisfy such a manly specimen as Adam. It's Clelie's own fire and passion that he needs, she avers, and if only he hadn't gone to New York his loneliness and her rituals might have bound him to her forever.
"We are about even in the breast department, though."
Clelie tells Eve it's time to go to the circle for the evening's sacrifice, but no sooner has she uttered it we hear the mocking voice of Lestrange, telling her she's meshuggah if she thinks he'll let her lead the poor girl to her death. He tears Clelie away and stands protectively between her and Eve. Clelie warns him off and claims if he doesn't give her back, he'll never leave the jungle alive. He sneers at the notion that Clelie could do him even the slightest harm, but she narrows her eyes, stiffens her brow, produces a pocket pistol and shoots him in the chest! As he staggers in pain and disbelief, she pushes him away and takes back her captive. He reaches out and grasps desperately at the collar of her dress, but she quickly pulls back and steals away into the night.
Once she's out of sight Lestrange stumbles against the tree and sits panting in a nook made of roots. He suddenly realizes there's something in his hand, and lifting it he sees Clelie's all-important protective ouanga he's just unwittingly torn from her neck.
"Now she's gonna get shtupped!"
Adam returns to the plantation house to find a British colonial police commander and a team of native bobbies conferring with a near-hysterical Aunt Sarah and Mr. Exposition, who seems rather too pleased with himself for having been such a goddamn know-it-all throughout the entire debacle. Sarah identifies the two zombies as the men who took Eve, and when Adam relates that he couldn't get a word out of them Mr. Exposition smugly declares "Oh, you won't either! They're as dumb as goats!" He also relays that they've doubtless been forced to do what they've done by someone who controls them. This leads our pencil-sharp Police Chief to ask if anyone might have a grudge against Eve, and Adam fingers Clelie...and not in a good way.
At this revelation Mr. E. just can't help his damn self but chimes in to boast "I always suspected her!"
"Well, you might have mentioned it before now!"
As the Chief leaves an officer to guard the zombies Aunt Sarah scurries inside to drown herself in gin, and everyone else heads over to Clelie's place see if she's available for a polite word or two.
We now join the assembled natives, sitting at the perimeter of the Voodoo ritual circle awaiting the evening's festivities. Jackson, Susie and the Driver come in last and try to blend in at the back, scanning the area for any sign of Eve. In a staging area hidden from the crowd Clelie changes into her ceremonial robes and headdress, leaving her paralyzed victim behind to wait for her part as she and WuTang begin the ceremony. Susie's eyes just about pop out of her head as she sees Clelie step away from the altar and face the crowd.
German Expressionism was also not on my bingo card.
Clelie does a weird interpretive dance with lots of clawing, grasping and pseudo-erotic contortions as the supplicants in the crowd sway their hands back and forth, looking very much like a bunch of extras rounded up on the streets of the nearest village about twenty minutes before the shoot, paid a nickel each and instructed to mimic the movements of some low-level crew member standing just off-camera to their left.
Money well spent, I say.
As the drummers drum and the crowd sings and sways, and Clelie does whatever the fuck it is she's doing, we see the various other interested parties all making their way through the jungle each trying to locate the Voodoo circle. Lestrange stumbles around clutching the wound in his chest, Adam presses on alone through the darkness and the police tramp through the dense underbrush, rifles at the ready to tamp down any trouble they may find. Mr. Exposition is with them, too, no doubt looking for another opportunity to demonstrate just how much shit he knows about everything. Finally, after what seems like an hour of moaning and gesticulating, Clelie finally brings Eve up before the altar and forces her to kneel on the ground facing the crowd. When Jackson and Susie see this, they realize they'll have no chance of rescuing Eve themselves, so they sneak away to get help.
Now it's a race against time, with shots of Clelie and WuTang making final ablutions and preparations for the sacrifice ritual intercut with everyone else who's trying to get to the circle to stop them still schlepping around in aimlessly in the woods. Clelie holds up a machete, smiling in her bloodlust for revenge, but just as she raises it to deliver the fatal blow, she sees Lestrange staring at her from the edge of the woods, holding her ouanga in one hand and a lit match in the other.
"Oops! I wet 'em!"
"Are you hot for me now, bubeleh?"
Clelie panics, drops the machete and flees into the night, leaving WuTang holding his little water bowl and looking equal parts bewildered and pissed off. Jackson and Susie have meanwhile run into Adam. They briefly bring him up to date about Eve's starring role as a Voodoo sacrifice victim and the three of them tear off to the circle to halt the performance. They get there just as WuTang grabs the machete and rears back to strike. Despite the angry crowd jumping up to try to stop them, Adam and Jackson manage to slow things down long enough for the police to arrive. A few timely gunshots cool the mob's ardor, and soon Wutang is in custody and Eve is safe in Adam's arms.
Clelie, now turned from hunter to prey, blindly gropes her way through the dense, stygian flora. She tears off her ceremonial robes then shuffles and shambles through the thickets in a dissociative daze. It's as if she has herself now become a zombie, subject to the commands of a new, dark destiny fraught with madness and despair. She reaches the base of an enormous tree and looks up in horror to find the corpse of young woman, dangling by the neck and wearing her own stolen dress!
Who wore it better?
As she desperately tries to reach the body to retrieve her garment, Lestrange emerges from the darkness and utters the timeless bon mot: "So! The Voodoo priestess has been out Voodooed!"
"Bazinga!"
He explains that much as he'd love to watch Clelie slowly and inexorably become stark raving naked...uh, I mean stark raving mad...he knows he's not going to live long enough to enjoy that welcome spectacle. As a sort of consolation prize, he corners her in the folds of the ten-foot-high tree roots and heroically strangles her to death.
The End.
Well, that was abrupt. Okay, it's not a good film by any stretch, and that was a hell of an anticlimactic ending, but I would argue that the thematic limitations of the time in which Ouanga was made pre-emptively and inescapably doomed it to mediocrity. There's a decent little revenge tale buried in all the muck and mumbo jumbo if you're willing to dig it out and Fredi Washington gives it all more dignity than it deserves, but the only way it could ever have worked is if the entire central dynamic had been turned completely inside out, with Clelie presented as the sympathetic antihero, fighting back against profound and clearly demonstrated abuse and betrayal by wicked white colonialist plantation bosses, and the only appropriate ending would be for her to successfully complete her revenge. In 1936 this narrative point of view would have been unthinkable, and in fact it wasn't until 1974, with the excellent blaxploitation classic Sugar Hill that we finally had a satisfying revisionist take on the subject matter.
Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I think Ouanga might just be ripe for a drastic reimagining. If Spike Lee or Jordan Peele happen to be reading this...let's just say I'm open to a collaboration.
Final Thoughts:
--Ouanga is only the second known Hollywood film to feature zombies, with the first being the Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie (1932).
--White Zombie's success inspired a brief vogue for films featuring Voodoo, which spawned among others, Black Moon (1934), featuring Fay Wray, Chloe, Love is Calling You (1934), a blatantly racist tale with thematic similarities to Ouanga, and Revolt of the Zombies (1936), which has previous been reviewed by MMT founder Nate here.
-- Writer/director George Terwilliger began his career in 1910. Ouanga was the last of 79 films he directed. His final film as a writer was a 1939 remake of Ouanga called The Devil's Daughter, which eliminated the interracial romance of the original in an attempt to make the film more marketable.
--Ouanga was restored in 2015 using an abbreviated 1951 reissue print, running just over 56 minutes. The original run time is unknown, but as a second or supplemental feature it was likely not much longer than what survives today.
--With regards to attempting to change the setting from Haiti to Paradise Island: Filming began on location in Haiti as planned, but the locals didn't take kindly to their deeply held religious beliefs being mocked by outsiders. There were threats made to crew members, and several Papaloi Voodoo priests openly cursed the production. There were mishaps on set, resulting in several injuries, and one crew member died of an infected barracuda bite. The production was then moved to Jamaica where principal photography was completed without further incident. Presumably the decision to change the narrative location came during post-production, but references to Haiti had already been inserted into the film.
As always, Cheers and thanks for reading!
Written by Bradley Lyndon in July, 2024.
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