Hurricanes, Disaster Films and Westerns

Hurricanes make great disaster films. It’s hard to look away as people battle the elements. Often many people die in these films, but we don’t really care, or at least don’t care for long, because we are focused on the heroes, and we know they will make it to the end.

 

Precisely 80 years ago a visually sensational disaster film premiered: The Hurricane (1937). For this film, Thomas T. Moulton (1896-1967)  won an Oscar for Best Sound Recording. Moulton would go on to win four more Oscars and two Technical Achievement Awards in the field of sound. Moulton was nominated for 15 more Oscars, four of these in the Best Visual Effects category. Definitely, The Hurricane has amazing pre- CGI, special effects.

 

Moulton also created the sound effects for the Technicolor extravaganza, Gone with the Wind (1939) emblematic of The Golden Age of Hollywood and in its own way a “disaster” film. In 1940 Gone with the Wind won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and became the “it” film of the 1930s. (Check out WatchMojo‘s Top 10 Movies of the 1930s.) Gone with the Wind culminated a decade that birthed dark horror films like Dracula (1931) and Island of Lost Souls (1932). Yet Gone with the Wind was not meant to be, in any way, a film about darkness, or those pushed to the margins, the “Other.” It never acknowledges the brutality of the slave system in the Antebellum South. It does acknowledge the suffering of those who fought to keep that system going. But we have all watched it, focusing on its many awards, its beautiful use of color and music, and of course, the Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable super-charged romance.

 

On the other hand, The Hurricane is a black and white film set far away from the mainland United States. But like Gone with the Wind, at its center, we find a couple that has to overcome extreme obstacles to be together. In The Hurricane, the couple, Marama and Terangi, are supposed to be native Polynesians who live on a beautiful South Sea island. The standard for the times, Marama was played by an American of European ancestry, Dorothy Lamour, while Terangi was played by Jon Hall whose father was Swiss and mother was a Tahitian princess. They get played as innocent and child-like. The Europeans get played as all-out paternalistic and, for the most part, simplistic extensions of colonial power and abuse. Yet, I found The Hurricane intriguing.

 

The Hurricane was directed by John Ford who, for me, is especially synonymous with The Searchers (1959). In this story, like in The Hurricane, it takes a lot to change the mind of a powerful male character. In fact, their minds do not change, at best they waver for a moment in their objectives. John Wayne and Raymond Massey play these two male characters, Ethan Edwards and Governor De Laage, that view themselves as the “norm” and bent on the submission, if not annihilation, of “difference.” Let me say that for a woman who teaches a class about the film and “otherness,” The Searchers is her “it” Western and now The Hurricane has become her “it” disaster movie.

 

And I will also admit that it was because of Hurricane Irma that The Hurricane fully registered on me. When on Wednesday, September 6th Irma’s ferocious eye missed Puerto Rico and passed to the island’s north, I was lucky enough to lose running water and electrical power for only a couple of days. Then when I got internet service back rather quickly, I wanted to look into “disaster films” because of what a man had said on CNN after Irma decimated Barbuda. He said something like this: “It was like a disaster film, as walls blew away, a mother hid her children in a bathroom cabinet, and then they all ran for cover when there was a break in the storm’s force. It was something you never really want to live through.”

 

Disaster films are a popular genre. Many of us, I included, enjoy them. Check out this AMC list. But living through a major hurricane is not like in a Hollywood movie. I know. I have made it through a Category 3. That’s what Hurricane Georges was when it crossed Puerto Rico from east to west on September 21, 1998. It was a very long night, things crashing all around, but about 3 AM suddenly everything went very quiet. I recognized the phenomena, the eye of the hurricane because my Abuela Isabel had told me about it. My grandmother never forgot that other storm that had moved over the island from east to west in 1932, Hurricane San Ciprián. I have never forgotten Georges.

 

The Taínos, native inhabitants of Puerto Rico, beheld hurricanes not as monsters but as a deity, Juracán, and an angry female spirit, Guabancex, rode at its center. This female spirit would appear when Mother Earth needed defending against a conspiracy of Air, Fire, and Water. This summer Guabancex’s anger has ratcheted up to never before seen levels.

 

Perhaps now the conspiracy is made up of those who still insist on the denial of global warming?

 

As I write these words, I await Hurricane Maria to reach the shores of Puerto Rico and wave her ferocious, angry arms over us. I am scared, like everyone else in her path.

 

But we are determined to make it through. See you on the other side!