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Reap the Wild Wind Movie Review

Reap the Wild Wind is a 1942 adventure film directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Ray Milland, John Wayne and Paulette Godard. It could have been more adventurous.

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“If I thought that wreck was planned,

I’d make a topsail out of Cutler’s hide!“

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Florida ship salvager, Loxi, falls for Jack, captain of a ship wrecked on the Key West shore. However, their romance is complicated by the arrival of another suitor. This movie disappointed me quite a bit. I’d expected a spirited old-fashioned adventure going in, but what I got was rarely as fun as it should have been.

There is of course that iconic giant squid sequence that predated a much more famous similar scene in an iconic Disney movie over a decade later. This scene is great and I wish more of the movie was like that. Whenever the movie focused on exploration and voyaging, it was wonderful.

Where it succeeded much less effectively is in the melodramatic and romantic department. The movie is too melodramatic and trite in its overall storyline. The film can be too sappy in its love triangle and the courtroom drama elements were only just serviceable.

It was wonderful seeing Ray Milland in more of a genre flick as I am usually used to him in the more serious drama movies and noirs. He was very good here per usual and is by far the most memorable actor of the bunch and playing the most memorable character. He even stole the show from John Wayne who did get first billing, but is actually secondary in importance to Milland.

As for Paulette Godard, she was surprisingly good and competent here. I found her charming and likable as always, but I found all female characters much less memorable than their male counterparts. More development should have been given to them.

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Reap the Wild Wind is technically superb. The directing from DeMille is fine and he did make many better movies throughout his career, but the editing is solid, the score is wonderfully operatic and dramatic while the costumes and the sets are uniformly terrific. The dialogue is also fine, but the movie needed a quicker pace. The effects are of course excellent, making the movie’s Oscar win in that department very much deserved.