New York Times, March 28, 1942
by Bosley Crowther
"After thirty years of making motion pictures, Cecil B. DeMille has pretty well learned the trade. He has learned that the camera has no motive unless there is plenty of movement in front of it; that drama, reduced to essentials, is just two strong men contending for a maid and, lately, that Technicolor is the dish for serving lavish spectacle. Thus it is not surprising that Reap the Wild Wind, his anniversary film, which roared into the Music Hall yesterday as the feature of a profuse Easter show, is the essence of all his experience, the apogee of his art and as jam-full a motion picture as has ever played two hours upon a screen. It definitely marks a DeMillestone. It is the master turned loose, with no holds barred.
For onto a gorgeous panorama representing the southern coast around 1840, Mr. DeMille has crowded a story filled with sea storms, ship wrecks and gang fights, and peopled with picaresque characters, dashing gentlemen and ladies in crinoline. He has worked a chattering monkey into it, and also a giant squid. He has sent two men, desperate rivals, into the bowels of a sunken ship in diving suits and there, in the greenish opalescence, has let them manifest the stuff of which they are made. He has splashed it with every color, from that of red coal oil to that of a yellow buttercup. Obviously the shrewd producer has hoped to sow another Gone With the Wind.
Mr. DeMille has indicated that the novel from which the picture is derived -- a novel by Thelma Strabel -- does not adhere very closely to the film. Of that we wouldn't know -- and of that we don't much care. For the story here unfolded has little distinction or definition; it is simply a running romance about a girl on the Florida Keys, two men of different types who love her and of shipwrecking as a trade. And in spite of a ponderous foreword which tries to tie it up with freedom of the seas, it is still just a bold adventure fable in which deeds loom larger than aims.
The heroine is Loxi Claiborne, a hoydenish sort of a girl who lives among the ravening salvage-masters and ship-wreckers of the Florida Keys. And for her affection there battle a bold but unstable shipmaster -- "a man who can ride out a sou'wester and clew up a topsail,: as she says -- and a refined but sufficiently courageous sea-lawyer from elegant Charleston. Through a variety of desperate crises these gentlemen rival gallantly, with alternate fights between themselves and then in tandem against the villainous ship-wreckers. And the climax is reached, as indicated, in a suspenseful and desperate conflict beneath the seas, in which a giant squid plays a not inconsiderable role.
Mr. DeMille and his writers plot a picture very carefully for scenic effects. And, in this particular instance, they have favored themselves magnificently. Reap the Wild Wind bulges with backgrounds which have the texture of museum displays. Rooms reek of quality and substance, gardens look like the annual flower show and the scenes of ships on the high seas exude a definite suggestion of salt air. The gentleman spends money on his pictures. Dollar signs are distinguishable everywhere.
And Mr. DeMille directs his actors in the grand and flamboyant style. Paulette Goddard as hot-blooded Loxi is a heroine of the staunch-and-ready school; and if she seems just a bit like Scarlett O"Hara, that is not implausible, now is it? John Wayne makes a rugged shipmaster, and Ray Milland is a stout sea-lawyer who speaks a line such as "Captain Jack Stuart will not sail in command of the Southern Cross" with the same determination of some one saying "Curfew shall not ring tonight!" Raymond Massey is a villainous ship-wrecker, more dastardly than Simon Legree, while Lynne Overman, Susan Hayward and Robert Preston handle lesser roles in true romantic style.
Reap the Wild Wind is a picture which represents the quintessence of make-believe. But, who, in this time of trouble, is going to take exception to that?"
The Hollywood Reporter, March 19, 1942
"Cecil Blount DeMille, in celebration of his 30th anniversary in pictures, turns to a swashbuckling sea spectacle lavishly splashed in Technicolor. His production and direction of Reap the Wild Wind, from Thelma Strabel's Saturday Evening Post novel, may well be treasured as the last such lush spectacle moviegoers are likely to see until the end of the war. The show, on a grand DeMille scale, is technically magnificent and will earn many times its cost at the nation's box-offices."
New York Herald Tribune, March 29, 1942
by Howard Barnes
"Reap the Wild Wind is not by any manner of means a notable film. It never fails, though, to be an outstanding show. Since that was exactly what DeMille was intent on producing, he has every right to be proud of his latest achievement in a long and lucrative association with the screen. It seems highly unlikely to me that the producer-director will ever be ranked with the great craftsmen of the cinema, but he has given the medium great impetus time after time, when it needed it badly."
Reviews from Hollywood Reporter and N. Y. Herald Tribune are taken from The Films of Cecil B. DeMille by Gene Ringgold and DeWitt Bodeen.
Other
writings:
From John Wayne American by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson , The Free Press, New York, (1995):
"He knew that DeMille wanted to cast him as the heavy, and he worried about the impact that the role would have on his career. The film called for Milland to play a "panty-waist" who shows his character by outfighting a tough sea captain. Wayne was not at all sure it was a good idea to play a punching bag for Milland's adult "Fauntleroy", and he had heard that DeMille could be brutal to his actors."
From Cecil B. DeMille by Charles Higham, Dell Publishing, New York (1973):
"DeMille began work on the picture by informing his production team ironically that he expected Ray Milland to be attacked by a real octopus and that he firmly intended having a real whale in one scene. The team applauded him tremendously.
One marvelous effect was inspired by an old fascination: the swaying of vividly colored kelp underwater. DeMille wanted to have an effect in which bolts of rich, iridescent cloth from a sunken ship would weave about in the brilliant green depths of the ocean. He didn't find out until too late that the color of silk changes in salt water, so the sequences took a month to photograph. He and his team, led by the cameraman Victor Milner, had to use fresh silk every day, dry out the old silk, and then send it down to be dyed to the exact shade. A waterproof dye had to be used, because the water could not be sullied.
The
film's greatest marvel was the giant mechanical squid made of bright
red sponge rubber which attacked Ray Milland and John Wayne in the
picture. Its insides operated by electric motors, it could lash out
and encircle a fill-size man with tentacles thirty feet long. The
biggest problem was to make these tentacles move convincingly, but it
was a problem triumphantly overcome. A 24-button electrical keyboard
operated the creature, and a complex forest of hydraulic pistons
activated cables extending into the 30-foot tentacles, so they could
be curled in any direction. The squid's large and evil eyes were
operated from the switchboard. DeMille's voice was brought to a
loudspeaker above the water level of the
eight-hundred-thousand-gallon tank so that he could direct the
movements of the squid. He directed Wayne and Milland underwater by
means of telephone wires which connected his helmet to theirs.
Reap the Wild Wind had magnificent reviews in New York, following its opening at the Radio City Music Hall on March 19, 1942. Bosley Crowther's review read like a press release. It was a marvelous adventure and audiences flocked to see it, a perfect escapist romance in the difficult days of 1942."
From A Star, Is A Star, Is A Star! - The Lives and Loves of Susan Hayward by Christopher P. Andersen, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, (1980):
"If Paramount was not exactly sure how to handle Hayward, DeMille had no difficulty seeing her as Druscilla Alston, Loxi's sweet but willful cousin. She met with De Mille in his memento-filled office at the studio. He asked her to read a few lines of dialogue -- and hired her on the spot.
Susan found that the DeMille behind the desk and the DeMille behind the camera were two radically different men. He barked orders like a tank commander and demanded total, blind and instant obedience from cast and crew. In Susan he had met his match. She appeared on the set for the first day's shooting outfitted in a ball gown of pastel pinks, blues and greens. Before the cameras rolled, Susan turned to the director. "Excuse me, Mr. De Mille, but do you think that ..."
"Young lady," came the reply, "I hired you for this film because I want an actress who can think for herself." "But, Mr. DeMille, this scene..." "Do that and you will take a load of worry off my mind and add countless years to your own career."
Susan spun around on her heels and walked off the set. She would recall the incident many years later: "One day he got particularly nasty and I blew. I then bearded production chief Buddy De Sylva in his den and said, "I won't go back on that set until the man apologizes."
De Sylva called the director to his office -- and he apologized. Susan had won.
"You are a very talented young lady." DeMille told her the last day of filming. "And that talent will undoubtedly carry you to stardom. But if I never make another picture with you, my dear, it will be too soon."
From Paulette, The Adventurous Life of Paulette Goddard by Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein, St. Martin's Press, New York, (1985).
"According to Hedda Hopper, C. B. DeMille and Paulette did not get along as well on Reap the Wild Wind as they had on North West Mounted Police. 'There were some days when they went at it hammer and tong,' said Hedda. 'But she learned to take it, and came out a full-fledged star, with even Cecil -- who is the toughest taskmaster in our business -- singing her praises.'"
From Wide-eyed in Babylon by Ray Milland, William Morrow & Company, Inc., New York, (1974).
"Cecil B. DeMille was unquestionably one of the greatest showmen the movies ever had. The industry is much the poorer for his loss. He could utilize a camera better than anyone. He had no peer at manipulating mobs or armies. He could stage and plan a battle better than Clausewitz. At spectacle he was the master. But he didn't know a damned thing about acting. A lot of people who worked with him will tell you this, but I am one of the few who can prove it."
NOTE: Mr. Milland follows this paragraph in his autobiography with two pages recounting the filming of the undersea battle with the giant squid. Milland says that one day he reported for shooting terribly hung over from a dinner the previous night. To avoid DeMille seeing him in that condition, he arrived early and arranged with the filming crew to be in his diving gear in the tank when DeMille arrived. He barely made it through the day -- let alone was able to act. But at the end of the day's shooting DeMille lauded Milland, saying he (DeMille) "had never seen a finer or more perceptive day's acting than he had that day." Milland continues: "I felt like a louse letting him appear a fool in front of all those people who were in the know. Strangely, though, after reading the foregoing, I'm beginning to wonder: who did what to whom?"