Zeus

Hurricane (1979)

• Director
  • Jan Troell
• Writers
  • James Norman Hall
  • Charles Nordhoff
  • Lorenzo Semple Jr.
• Stars
  • Jason Robards
  • Mia Farrow
  • Max von Sydow

  This film showed up on TV as Forbidden Paradise, but you can't fool us. It's really The Hurricane, producer Dino De Laurentiis' ill-advised remake of the 1938 Sam Goldwyn production of the same name. The story of the casual cruelties imposed by the white ruling class on the natives of the isle of Manakoora had the advantage of timeliness in 1938; forty-one years later, the story plays like a Gilligan's Island amateur production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Playing the old Jon Hall role of the native lad whose rambunctiousness incurs the wrath of the provincial governor, the uniquely ungifted Daton Kane makes Hall look like Sir John Gielgud. Even the expensive hurricane finale (which ate up most of the film's $22 million budget) isn't one-tenth as exciting as the corresponding sequence in the earlier film. The saddest aspect of the 1979 The Hurricane is that it was directed by Jan Troell, who showed flashes of brilliance in his earlier The Emigrants and Zandy's Bride; perhaps significantly, Troell hightailed it back to Sweden after wrapping up his obligation to Dino De Laurentiis.