Word: reapings
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...Reap the Wild Wind (Paramount) has all that money (about $1,800,000 worth) can buy: horrendous hurricanes, sailing ships to buck them; a monster squid, brave men and bold to tackle it; a dressmaker's dream of a cotillion; flora & fauna and seascapes galore; vermilion cockatoos and great red cheeses; red-coated slaves and monkeys in the rigging; rooms, houses, towns, cities, dripping with elegance and Technicolor...
...What Reap hasn't got is what it takes, which money can't buy. This so-called saga of the seafaring U.S. of 1840 is seldom credible, only occasionally exciting. It has its moments (some Grade-A brawling, excellent underwater photography, an occasional astonishing set), but they are inadequate substitutes for real characters and a good story. The story itself is the successful fight of shipowners to break up a gang of salvage pirates among the Florida keys. Paulette Goddard is there, speakin' Southern and doin' her best to get a little honest salvage away from...
...Cecil Blount De Mille could have made Reap the Wild Wind. He has been making this kind of picture, in one form or another, for the last 29 years. Its name is spectacle. He likes spectacles. So have the estimated 800,000,000 cinemaddicts who have paid some $200,000,000 to see Reap's 65 predecessors. So has Paramount, which banked most of the $55,000,000 in film rentals that have made it happy and De Mille rich...
Vain, shrewd, assertive, benevolent, half uplifter, half showman, at 60 De Mille is Hollywood's oldest successful movie maker. He got there by ignoring the art of motion-picture making, concentrating on expensive theatrics, and trimming his sails to the prevailing breeze. Reap is part of his latest excursion-pioneer Americana, a blend of history & hokum which has produced North West Mounted Police, Paramount's top grossing picture (about $2,500,000) of the last ten years. This calculated program has not produced one really fine motion picture, but it has long entertained the biggest segment...
...Mille has a formula, beyond mere size (always colossal) and style (always his own), it is one long practiced by the rest of Hollywood. It is called "insurance." It works this way: after loading Reap with all the enticing ingredients he could think of, De Mille insured it against failure by adding the ingredients of recent successful escape pictures and doing them a bit bigger or better, plus Technicolor...