"EBB TIDE"

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 16 July 1938, Page 6

"EBB TIDE"

STORY OF THE SOUTH SEAS AND THE FIRST SEA FILM IN COLOUR

Whoever read “The Ebb Tide,” by R. L. Stevenson and his step-son Lloyd Osbourne, in the long ago, and thrilled over it as one of the best works of the former’s pen, should not miss it in the transference to the screen. The first sea picture to be done in colour most of it is so beautiful as to take the breath away. It is one of the first of the colour pictures in which the story so absorbs and blends with the greens and blues, and the flesh tints, that, after a while, the onlooker forgets about the new medium. This is as colour should be. In the past it has failed largely because it has been used so that it distracted the attention, and therefore detracted from the human appeal of the film. Besides this the leading characters are so admirably handled by the actors that your fashionings of the book Walk before you in living form. Just a simple tale of three pariahs taking command of a trading schooner,

on which they are officers en route to Australia, and berthing at a South Sea Island run by a religious fanatic, doing well on the side with pearls, and with whom they come to violence. * There is a sense of hard, unrelenting, crude wickedness in the atmosphere. Oscar Homolka was imported from England to take the part of Captain Thorbecke, and Barry Fitzgerald, trained among the Irish Players, does the horrible little beachcombing cockney in a grand way.

Milland is the young Englishman, inherently of a decent type, who is saved by the intervention of Frances Farmer who happens to own the schooner, who has pleaded with the renegads not to pirate the vessel, but whose appearances does eventually prove a turningpoint in the career of Milland. Frances is a good, positives type, making the necessary feminine smoothness to tone down the eminent villainy of the men.