The End of Something

Twenty years ago, give or take a few weeks, I took a day off from work to see a matinee of Tim Burton's Batman Returns. This year I felt no need to take time off so I could go to a midnight show of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. That's no reflection on Nolan. I'm eager to see the picture, but can't justify skipping work even if I'm entitled. I'll see it sometime this weekend, barring unforeseen circumstances, but the film is the real event, not the time you see it. If its arrival has the air of a historic event, that's not all hype. Rises is likely to be the last film of its kind: a big-budget brand-name superhero film that takes place in a director's "universe" rather than a comic-book publisher's. Between the premiere of Batman Begins in 2005 and tomorrow, Marvel Studios has changed the game for the genre and altered expectations for fans of comic-book movies. Warner Bros. is expected to emulate Marvel in the future when developing film treatments of its corporate cousins at DC Comics. Next year's Man of Steel will be transitional, brandishing the Nolan brand name while probably aspiring to transcend it.

The film Warners and DC really want to make, everyone believes, is Justice League, the super-team saga that, ironically enough, drove Stan Lee to initiate the "Marvel Age of Comics," including The Avengers, because Lee's boss wanted a similar book for his line -- he got The Fantastic Four. How soon Justice League will get made is unclear, but it seems more certain that the next film adaptation of a DC comic after Man of Steel will be set in someplace recognizable as the "DC Universe." Such a place will be defined by its multiplicity and diversity of superpowered beings, and as such it'll be the antithesis of the imagined worlds of Batman in the seven films made since 1989. The closest any of those movies has come to acknowledging even the possible existence of other superheroes is George (Batman) Clooney's crack in Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin, "This is why Superman works alone." The irony, of course, is that it's Batman who's worked alone in movies, whose franchise has failed, or rather refused to fertilize a universe of crimefighters and superheroes. Superman has worked alone as well, of course, and much of this compartmentalization was a matter of rights, different producers like Michael Uslan claiming individual characters rather than seizing or receiving a universe. That situation has changed, but it's arguable that Nolan has held back the evolution of a cinematic DC universe by claiming auteurial rights over Batman. If so, he was only claiming his due, much as Tim Burton did. If neither was a household name at the time of his first Batman movie, by each man's sequel the director's personal vision had become a major selling point, and The Dark Knight Rises is being sold primarily as the climax of Nolan's vision. By comparison, how much of Iron Man was Jon Favreau's vision. Whatever the fraction, it was probably greater than Kenneth Branagh's visionary contribution to Thor, or Joe Johnston's to Captain America, or even Joss Whedon's to The Avengers. Marvel has embarked on another series of films, with none of the aforementioned directors returning -- except perhaps for Whedon down the line. Marvel does not want a Christopher Nolan, and while Warners seemingly offered the entire DC Universe to Nolan, one suspects that they wanted the name more than the man.

There really can be no place in the future of superhero movies for an auteur who balks in any way at his characters interacting with characters from other comics or their movie adaptations. Superhero cinema is becoming a corporate art in more than the obvious monetary ways. Making superhero movies will be a collaborative, editorially-supervised practice. The age of the auteur -- the Nolans, the Burtons, the Sam Raimis -- is almost certainly over. Some comics fans will welcome this. The multitudes of superbeings is an essential part of the comics reading experience for these people that only the Marvel movies have begun to translate into film. Even some admirers of Nolan protest that his quasi-realistic vision limited the cinematic possibilities for Batman compared to what can happen to him in comics -- that you're not getting the true Batman experience unless the more outlandishly powerful characters like Mr. Freeze of Clayface can cut loose, or unless Superman or Green Lantern can drop into Gotham for a visit and a team-up. A lot of Batman fans feel differently, but many DC fans are not so committed to Batman's isolation and would welcome a Justice League film. To be blunt, I see no artistic imperative to make that film, but there's nothing automatically preventing such a project from being at least as good as The Avengers. But why couldn't there be a Justice League jamboree and more individual films, in any sense of the word, at the same time? I can't help thinking that one option will preclude the other, however, in a way that makes another Burton or Nolan franchise unlikely -- and that would be a real loss. The imminence of that loss makes The Dark Knight Rises more of an event than it already is -- more than most people watching may realize.

The Dark Knight's Lady

My earliest memory of Batman is also a memory of Catwoman. Maybe I'm misremembering; I probably watched lots of the old Batman TV show without specific incidents making strong impressions, but I remember it being unusual for one of his enemies to die, and still more unusual for him to regret it. The episode was "Scat, Darn Catwoman," from the second of the show's three seasons. I later learned that it wasn't the first time that Catwoman had seemed to die; she'd fallen into a bottomless pit in Julie Newmar's only appearance of the first season. This second death -- Catwoman had lives to spare -- is still unusual for its build-up. There's nothing like the foot chase, with Newmar and Adam West apparently doing their own running, in the entire series. Maybe it was a form of padding, with no one able to come up with the usual melee gags. But it seems more like a build-up to a dramatic moment, though the moment itself is capped in camp fashion as Batman's mourning is made into a typical Bat-gag.



Newmar's persona isn't fully formed in the "Purr-Fect Crime/Better Luck Next Time" diptych from the first season. In those shows Catwoman is a less appealing (though still undeniably attractive), more ruthless figure, backstabbing her own gang so she can have a whole treasure for herself. It's not until the second season -- and after Lee Merriwether coldly replaced her in the big-screen version of the show -- that Newmar and key Catwoman writer Stanley Ralph Ross came into their own. In that season, with the exception of a story where she was shoehorned in to support a lackluster new villain, Michael Rennie's Sandman, Newmar can do no wrong. Ross had figured out how to ring the changes on Catwoman's love-hate relationship with Batman and make the most of the comic chemistry between Newmar and West. The actors' best scenes together are paradoxically funny, emphasizing the sex-temptation angle while portraying both Catwoman and Batman as overgrown nerds and brats, playing out life-and-death showdowns like schoolyard games. Look at the climax of "The Bat's Kow-Tow," when Catwoman almost abashedly explains, with Batman's encouragement, how her voice-stealing device -- her own invention, apparently -- works. Note also the moment when Catwoman, maybe uniquely among the show's villains, seems capable of defeating Batman single-handedly, yet can't do it.



Newmar and West are at their bickering bratty best in their last teaming, "Batman Displays His Knowledge." Their comic timing over a long take is impeccable as Newmar careens from seductive mode to blustering claws-baring "katrate" stances. This two parter (opening with "Catwoman Goes to College") seems like a missed opportunity as Bruce Wayne becomes Catwoman's probation sponsor. It looks like a perfect setup for the Princess of Plunder to go after Wayne's fortune, yet she promptly plunges into a plot to frame Batman, while Wayne pays attention to his new charge only as Batman. Bruce is a disaster of inaction in his assigned role, but there's a payoff for that in the two-parter's closing scene, Newmar's final appearance in the series. Confronting her one last time in his civilian identity, an uncomfortable Bruce seems to realize that he's screwed up, while Catwoman is a portrait of serene desolation. Showing no defiance, she consoles the warden, reminding him that her recidivism is the exception, not the rule. Then, after telling Batman earlier that reform was hopeless for her without the love of a good man, she tells Bruce that there might have been something between them, except that her heart belongs to Batman. You might not hear it here, but on a proper TV you can hear her say "good-bye" as she exits the frame. The story may be that Newmar didn't return for the third season because she was tied up on a thankless movie shoot (McKenna's Gold), but when I watch this I sense that she knew she was done. There's a last bow quality about it that's undeniable, as if Ross, who would go on to write a very different Catwoman for Eartha Kitt, knew he'd said all he could as well.



These stories were my first meaningful exposure to romance, the first romances that had an impact on me. If there was an overarching story to the Batman series, at least in its first two seasons, his combative courtship of Catwoman was it. I watched those shows before I ever read a Batman comic book, without the comics fans sense of insult over travestied sacred texts. I went through that phase later, when I did become a comics fan and took the books seriously. But the very first Batman comic I bought had a surprise in it. It was Batman 320, if I remember right, from sometime in 1980. The Joker was kidnapping Batman's allies to make them candles in a birthday cake for himself, and one of his stops was Bruce Wayne's residence. I don't recall whether he was after Wayne himself, who was absent, or Alfred the butler, whom he captured, but there hanging out in the mansion was one Selina Kyle, helpfully identified for me by the Clown Prince of Crime as "the sultry Catwoman." I'd never seen or heard the name before. Anyway, resenting the intrusion on Wayne's behalf, Selina Kyle set about clobbering the Joker's minions until he kayoed her with some gag boxing glove. It did not occur to him to make her a candle; he was probably confused, as I was, about what she was doing there.

In time, I learned that Selina, claiming to have reformed, had approached Bruce Wayne, not knowing him to be Batman, in the self-interested hope that he'd fund a cure for some rare disease she'd contracted. Romance ensued. I was intrigued. Ever since then, through "reboots" that reset the DC Universe, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle -- the TV character was never called by that name -- have been on again, off again. The tone as actually set slightly before Len Wein wrote the stories I've just described. One of DC Comics's ingenious ideas during the "Silver Age" of superhero comics (roughly 1956-86) was that the heroes of the "Golden Age" of superhero comics' origins lived on a separate planet in a separate dimension from the present-day heroes. DC could thus show slightly-different versions of the current heroes aging and evolving beyond what a monthly comic could tolerate. On "Earth-2," readers learned, the original Batman and Catwoman from the 1940s eventually did marry. After the Crisis on Infinite Earths ended the Silver Age and rebooted the DC Universe, this event presumably never happened, but following the most recent reboot, in 2011, the "New 52" universe once more includes an Earth-2 where a Batman married a Catwoman, or at least had a daughter together. Legends of this sort make a romance between the characters in the current monthly comics a matter of fate. It definitely becomes a temptation and at least twice in the last 30 years editors apparently decided that things had gone too far. After writers in the mid-1980s had made Batman and Catwoman too close -- she had practically become his crimefighting sidekick, a story was concocted in which Selina had her brain fried and rewired by a mad scientist, the results being that she reverted to villainy and conveniently forgot Batman's secret identity. No such contrivance was needed more recently; the 2011 reboot once more stripped Catwoman of that key bit of knowledge and restored some distance between the characters after Ed Brubaker, Jeph Loeb and succeeding writers had developed the Bat-Cat relationship over the past decade. These changes are artificial and jolting to longtime readers, not to mention "shippers" for whom relationships are all, but there's a reasonable argument for them. Unless you, like many other people, including one with a quarter-billion-dollar budget, propose to write "the last Batman story," some respect for basic archetypes are in order. If you bring Batman and Catwoman too close together, you risk losing much of the tension and pathos that made their stories compelling originally. If Catwoman becomes no more than a loyal supporting character or partner of Batman, you may miss what makes her interesting. The potential for a redeeming relationship may make for better comic book stories than a realized relationship. Tim Burton understood this and succeeded, when he used an unorthodox Catwoman -- a supernatural avenger rather than a charismatic bandit -- in Batman Returns, in taking the pathos occasionally invoked on the old TV show to a new level of romantic tragedy.

Art by Jim Lee

Christopher Nolan's work with Batman would not really have been done, in my opinion, if he didn't give us a Catwoman. With some cajoling, Nolan himself came around to that view, and the world will see the results this weekend. Not everyone may agree. Batman comics fans have diverse opinions about their hero's love life or his potential for one. The three largest factions might be described as "Team Selina," "Team Talia" and "Team Neuter." In the comics, Selina Kyle's great rival for Bruce Wayne's and Batman's affections for the last forty years has been Talia al-Ghul, the rebellious daughter of assassin-king Ra's al-Ghul. Talia, whom many people still expect to see in The Dark Knight Rises, is the ideal for those who idolize the writing of Denny O'Neil, the scribe who liberated Batman comics from the incubus of the TV show's camp legacy. Many fans find Talia's story more compelling than Selina's -- O'Neil came to the comics with an initial contempt for the costumed villains tainted by association with TV -- and the character simply more attractive. The fact (in current continuity) that Talia is the mother of Batman's only child would seem to make her the woman in his life even though present writer Grant Morrison portrays her as a more implacable enemy than Catwoman ever was. Talia has been central to several great stories over the decades, but for me she's always lacked that primal opposites-attract quality that Catwoman brings to the comics. A smaller fourth faction, represented most recently in comics by Kevin Smith, might argue for Silver St. Cloud, the romantic interest in the small late-70s run of stories by Steve Engelhart and Marshall Rogers that are still considered one of the greatest achievements in Batman history, while no one, I suspect, takes Vicki Vale, the star of comics, 1949 serial and 1989 movie, seriously as Bruce Wayne's great love. "Team Neuter," I hope, speaks for itself. Suffice it to say that some people are happy, or at least more comfortable, with Batman having no strong romance in his life. It's as valid a viewpoint as any, but also less interesting. Had Christopher Nolan a more exploitative mentality, he might have made his new movie a different kind of bonanza by pitching it as a kind of anti-Twilight, with a hero torn between two uber-women -- but for now it's still the official word that there's no such creature as Talia in his movie, despite irrepressible speculation about the role played by Marion Cotillard. The comic-book movie business being what it is, such a movie may yet be made some day.

While I want to judge The Dark Knight Rises on its own terms, I also have to admit that how Nolan treats Selina Kyle -- while he has no problem calling the character "Catwoman" in interviews, she'll never be called by that name in the picture -- will strongly influence my opinion. For the new film to succeed fully, Nolan has to get Catwoman right. That doesn't mean he has to match some ideal I have of the character; Burton and Michelle Pfeiffer triumphed with an interpretation resembling no previous version of Selina. Nolan and Anne Hathaway have deep boots to fill, but I've liked most of what I've seen in the trailers and commercials. Considering what I've just written, there's no point in my attempting a list of what director and actress have to do. They just have to not screw up one of the most important elements of the Batman legend. I won't know whether they have or not until I see the movie. Until then, I hope to have something to say about Rises's prospective place in pop-culture history tomorrow.

Bat-clips from The Bat's Kow-Tow and Batman Displays his Knowledge uploaded by captivebatfan; Scat! Darn Catwoman uploaded by Fanof Bats.

William Asher (1921-2012)

Asher was some sort of auteur. A sitcom specialist who spent most of the Sixties directing his wife Elizabeth Montgomery on Bewitched, he was also the principal director of American-International's "Beach Party" series and, just to be different, the director of the violent neo-noir cult film Johnny Cool, in which Montgomery played an unreliable romantic lead for Henry Silva's title gangster. Asher's Beach pictures are sunbaked pop art, comic books come to formulaically anarchic life or something almost like being. I ignore the banality of beauty on the surface and focus on the reanimated old-timers like Karloff and Keaton, playing roles or playing "themselves," whose presence is less degrading than deifying, and on the eternal recurrence of the Rats and their master, Erich von Zipper, a burlesque villain godlike and hapless at once, pining after his "ideal," raging against the "stupids" all around him, asking always, "Why me? Why me all the time?" Time has been kind, I think, to films I would probably have hated had I lived when they opened. They'll never be comedy classics, but they now enjoy the charm of good-natured obsolescence as they document their era's cloudless fantasy of a world without real threats and with parties every day. Before the hippies came, Bill Asher did much to shape the Sixties of our media-based retroactive imaginations. Like it or not, he was a major contributor, in quantitative if not qualitative terms, to our pop-culture legacy, and that makes his passing worthy of notice here.

VIGILANTE (1983)

William Lustig is an honored name among cult-movie collectors for his DVD entrepreneurship, mainly as the proprietor of the Blue Underground video line. He gained cult credibility as a director, his best known works being the 1980 slasher film Maniac and the 1988 extravaganza Maniac Cop ("You have the right to remain silent ... forever."). Between these landmarks Lustig got involved with the vigilante genre, taking the most obvious yet unused-to-date title for his 1983 picture. Lustig's Vigilante is a stripped-down version of the archetype, notable for an absence of either introspection or much in the way of cheerleading. Vigilantism is simply taken as a phenomenon, an inevitable reaction to systemic injustice as a bystander is sucked into the maelstrom. Robert Forster plays Eddie Marino, whose co-workers, led by Fred Williamson's Nick, are clandestine vigilantes. We see them in action dragging a rapist off a street corner ("Slime!" one yells at the criminal). We later learn that the gang broke nearly every bone in the perp's body. The cops seem to have a clue who's doing this stuff, but no evidence. After one warns Nick, Eddie wonders what's going on but wants to keep his nose clean. He'll soon think differently after his wife insults a gang member at a gas station. His gang follows her home, tears up the place, tears her up pretty bad, and blasts her little son to death with a shotgun -- we see a window explode with bits of red on the fragments. Eddie assumes a legal remedy is at hand and an earnest prosecutor encourages that belief. But the gangs have the power and the money, so that the gang leader plea-bargains his way to a suspended sentence and Eddie gets sent to jail for going nuts and attacking the judge. During his two months in stir he's saved from rape only by an old con (Woody Strode), and the near-miss hardens his attitude even further. Once free, he learns that his traumatized wife is leaving him; she wants no reminders of the past. Vigilante is nearly Kafkaesque in its accumulation of injustices and indignities on its poor protagonist. But never mind the literary pretension. Lustig's film is a coiled spring that takes pressure until it releases. Eddie wants in on Nick's vigilante gang, who help him track down the gang members so he can wipe them out. But that's not all. The film closes on an ambivalent note -- at least I felt ambivalent about it -- when Eddie extends his vengeance campaign to the judge who put him in jail. Is that going too far? Lustig doesn't give us time to dwell on it, though the finish means it's up to us, not him, to decide whether Eddie has crossed one line too many. All the film tells us is that Eddie was pushed too far and pushed back.

Forster makes a good everyman hero without having to do much fancy acting, while Fred Williamson's limitations as an actor work in his favor here, underscoring his character's singleminded fanaticism. What he lacks in subtlety he makes up for in disquieting intensity. The locations look appropriately grungy, and the film as a whole has a look that qualifies it for "last film of the Seventies" consideration. There's nothing special about the action or the film's big car chase, but the film moves briskly. It definitely ends briskly, and it's bound to seem incomplete to anyone curious about the consequences for Eddie, Nick and their friends. You're tempted to wonder whether there was more story to tell, but no more money to tell it with. Another, more unsettling reading is possible. Our expectation that there should be more to the story is based on an assumption that the protagonists' vigilantism is exceptional, with necessary implications for the transgressors. Ending the film without the usual soul-searching or police manhunt creates a counter-impression that Eddie's reaction has become a normal one, or at least an inevitable one, in his present-day dystopia. It isn't really a satisfying finish, but maybe it wasn't meant to be.

Darrligsmag uploaded this version of the original trailer to YouTube. Note the second-person spiel toward the end: you, not Forster's character, have to take a stand, it seems.

Idiots of the Week: Dark Knight Rises Critic-Haters

Idiot of the week is an occasional feature of my political blog, The Think 3 Institute. It's occasional rather than weekly because I feel no need to make a ritual out of it, and I want the idiocy recognized to stand out from the run-of-the-mill stupidity that's encountered all too often in political life. I've moved the feature to Mondo 70 for the first time as an unintended preface to a series of posts I've planned leading up to Friday's release of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Rises. As some readers may know, this film is a sequel to a 2008 Nolan movie called The Dark Knight and the conclusion of a trilogy the director began back in 2005, literally enough, with Batman Begins. As both of those films were successful, the second film more so than the first, the third film is rather highly anticipated in many quarters. Many people want Rises to be a good, even great film -- I wouldn't mind that myself. Some people, unfortunately, don't want to hear bad news, even though they strain to hear it amid a mounting volume of hosannas greeting Rises as if it were the Second, or rather Third Coming. Many professional reviewers have seen the film by now and have started to post their reviews on media websites. The Rotten Tomatoes website keeps a running tab of early critical opinion; as I write, it reports that 29 reviewers have rated it "fresh," while 2 have deemed it "rotten." Working with the reviewers' star-ratings, letter grades, and other appraisal systems, it gives Rises a 94% "fresh" rating so far. Impressive, no? No! -- as far as many people are concerned, for those two heretics, and for much of the day a lone heretic, Marshall Fine -- have ruined Rises's perfect score. As a result, numerous Nolan fans have flamed poor Fine, deeming his opinion, after seeing the picture, inferior to theirs, sight unseen.

Part of this results from presumptions of prejudice on Fine's part. He must hate superhero movies, or like Marvel movies better, etc., etc. Superhero-movie fans are perhaps especially defensive against any hint of prejudice against the genre. But so what? If you're a superhero-movie fan, or a Batman fan in particular, or a fan of Christopher Nolan's work in general, are you going to like Rises any less because Fine, whom I'd never heard of before today, disliked it? But perhaps these people are insecure in their anticipation and want no hint from anyone, no matter how prejudiced they assume the source to be, that the film might not live up to their eschatological expectations. My own expectations are pretty high despite my less than rapturous reception of Nolan's last picture, the heavy-handed dream fantasy Inception. My expectations probably differ from those of the people who would hear no criticism as well as those of the critics, since I liked different things about The Dark Knight than most people. Some of my expectations have less to do with Christopher Nolan than with my near-lifetime of Batman fandom. For me, there's a standard that Nolan has to meet, which I hope to elaborate on later this week; Nolan doesn't set the standard himself. That's why I can't accept this idiotic notion, from people who haven't seen the movie, that it's above criticism from people who have seen it, or that any criticism is automatically wrong in some way. It's still possible for Nolan to get Batman, and in this case Catwoman, wrong at the last moment. I don't mean that he might deviate from my ideal of either character. I do mean that he can still screw up as a moviemaker. I welcome any vision that's different but good, especially since The Dark Knight Rises may be the last mainstream superhero movie with license to be "different" -- but that's also a topic for later in the week. For now, let me say to anyone freaking out because they read a thumbs-down review that I hope you like the film better than Marshall Fine or Christy Lemire did, and that once you've seen it you can prove how they saw things wrong. Until then, you're idiots.

Celeste Holm (1917-2012)

One week after Ernest Borgnine's death ended his tenure as the earliest surviving winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor, the earliest surviving winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar has passed on, also at the age of 95. Holm won her statue for the 1947 Best Picture winner, Gentlemen's Agreement, but may be better known for her role in a somewhat better-loved film, the 1950 Best Picture All About Eve, for which she received another Oscar nomination. At least that's the film I remember and like her best from. She was also one of the original Broadway cast of the seminal Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, which opened back in 1943. She returned to acting near the end of her life; the final two entries on her IMDB filmography are a completed film scheduled for a 2013 release and another in postproduction. Both are low-budget independent productions, the latter also sporting Mickey Rooney and other seniors in the cast. The earliest surviving Best Supporting Actress is now Eva Marie Saint, who won for 1954's On the Waterfront. The earliest surviving nominee for the award is Olivia de Havilland, who was considered for Gone With the Wind before winning two Best Actress Oscars in the 1940s. Those make her the third-earliest surviving Best Actress winner, behind 102 year old Luise Rainer (1936 and 1937) and de Havilland's sister Joan Fontaine (1941). Rainer is no doubt watching her back if she takes the comes-in-threes rule seriously, as may be George Chakiris, the earliest surviving Best Supporting Actor winner for 1961's West Side Story. This trivia aside, every remaining link lost to classic Hollywood is to be regretted, and this blog pays its respects to Celeste Holm's memory.

DVR Diary: NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET (1931)

W. S. "Woody" Van Dyke was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's specialist in exotica dating back to 1928's White Shadows in the South Seas, a silent film that portrayed Polynesian folk as Edenic innocents corrupted by the "white shadow" of the civilized world's greed. Van Dyke carried on in exotic mode into the talkie and Pre-Code era, most memorably as the director of Johnny Weissmuller's debut as Tarzan the Ape Man. That film has a somewhat different idea of the un-"civilized" world from that of White Shadows, and so does the Peter B. Kyne story -- he also authored 3 Godfathers -- Van Dyke directed from an adaptation by three screenwriters. Itself a remake of a lost 1925 silent directed by Maurice Tourneur, Never the Twain Shall Meet is just about the polar opposite from White Shadows, since it's the story of Polynesian culture corrupting a civilized white man. Corruption comes in the form of Tamea (Conchita Montenegro), a half-breed daughter of a white ship captain and a Polynesian princess. The princess is dead and the captain is leprous and suicidal when he brings his latest cargo, including Tamea, to San Francisco, where he entrusts the cargo and the daughter to Dan Pritchard (Leslie Howard) and promptly jumps overboard to his death. Given Howard's presence, movie buffs probably can't help anticipating a Pygmalion approach to the material as the somewhat uptight trader welcomes the nearly wild girl into his mansion. She speaks English just about adequately, plays a wicked concertina, but isn't quite comfortable in American clothes. She assumes that "Daniel Pritchard," as she always calls him, is meant to be her mate, and her demands for his physical attention -- she won't agree to dress for a social evening unless he kisses her -- complicates Dan's relationship with his frosty fiancee (Karen Morley). Dan's indulgent and forgiving of Tamea's innocent aggression and grows increasingly defensive as the fiancee and his own father (C. Aubrey Smith) increasingly disapprove of the island girl. When the elder Pritchard finally arranges to have Tamea shipped back to her home, Dan rebels against convention and follows her to the island, which proves anything but paradise for him.

Dan doesn't care for the food or the way the natives eat it. He cares less for the other whites on the island, especially the alcoholic beachcomber (Clyde Cook) who predicts ruin like his own for Dan. Worst of all, Tamea proves hopelessly promiscuous, running off with handsome island boys at every opportunity but still expecting Dan to love her. Her apparently instinctual infidelity demoralizes Dan until he becomes a dirty, drunken beachcomber just as predicted. First disgusted by Tamea's conduct, he vows to quit the island, but Tamea solves the problem by inviting him to beat her. "Beat me but don't hate me," she pleads in the Pre-Code Play of the Film, "Beat me or you will hate me!" Dan takes a few whacks that have the desired effect, one presumes, on both people, and so things go until his old fiancee shows up on the island to see what's become of him. She finds Dan drunk and defensive, still insisting that he can leave any time he feels like it. Very well then, she says -- she'll go back to San Francisco and wait for him. She can do nothing but wait, she reminds him, because there can only ever be one man for her. The contrast with Tamea is like a cold shower to our hero, who resists all further temptation from Tamea, cleans up, packs his bag and departs on the same boat as his true love, going so far as to drag his fellow white man, the beachcomber, kicking and screaming on board for redemption. Tamea sulkily watches the ship depart, broods a minute or so, and then runs off with the first available boy-toy. The End.

Earlier in the picture, when a friend of Dan's in San Francisco confronts Tamea with the hard fact that the white race shouldn't mingle with others, her indignation and Dan's sympathetic response suggested a brave anti-racist direction for this movie. Boy, was I wrong. If anything, its escalatingly harsh presentation of Tamea makes Never the Twain one of the most bigoted films I've seen from the Pre-Code era. A non-racist reading might have been possible had the film suggested that Tamea was just a nympho or hopelessly starved for male attention, but the hints from the beachcomber that he'd had a similar experience suggest that Tamea is really just a typical mindlessly promiscuous island girl. The contrast between Tamea and Dan's selflessly faithful fiancee reinforces the assumption of the era that non-whites or "primitive" people were incapable of living according to any ideal higher than instant gratification of appetites. Somehow this situation never arises in the more "noble savage" fantasies like White Shadows or Bird of Paradise. In those pictures it's assumed that a white man can find a true, albeit doomed love in the islands. Never the Twain is just as much a fantasy, but it's much nastier and not very convincing. Howard is his usual cool customer and lacks much chemistry with the Spaniard Montenegro, who plays Tamea less like an island siren and more like a bratty child. It must be added that, in retrospect, there's simply nothing seductive about dancing with a concertina. The childish aspect of Montenegro's performance is in keeping with the era's assumption that aboriginal people were "just children," and both the performance and the assumption make Never the Twain a childish film. It's one of those films that make an enthusiasm for Pre-Code cinema occasionally embarrassing.