The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

It is not only nonsense, it's very silly nonsense. But rather pretty visually mainly because of Heddy Lamar and Robert Taylor.It's a typical Hollywood fantasy of the "Orient". The city was supposed to be Saigon but the background, the temple, and the dancers were of Bangkok. And her clothes were not even Asian, they were Moroccan and some outlandish Hollywood creation. But, for Hollywood, anything beyond the white world are interchangeable and we frequently see Vietnamese play Chinese and Chinese play Japanese and vice versa or white people play Asian. Even Marlon Brando couldn't escape such ridiculousness. Time has not changed Hollywood much. Now it's black people popping up everywhere no matter what the story, the genre, or the time and place to continue the silly ridiculous nonsense. Nominated for 1 "Oscar"? The standard must be very low back then.

With a script by Ben Hecht, LADY OF THE TROPICS is a film that recalled another Hedy Lamarr film--at least the title does--called "A Lady Without Passport"--a wretched film she made in 1950. Here too, she's a lady without passport and that's what triggers the entire plot. But it must be said that the comparison between the two films ends with the title.This is strictly old-fashioned melodrama reeking of either "Manon Lescaut" or "Madame Butterfly", with Hedy as the ill-fated heroine who allows herself to be "used" by Joseph SCHILDKRAUT while hiding her indiscretions from her smitten American admirer (ROBERT TAYLOR), who meets her in French Indochina (Saigon) before WWII and immediately falls in love with her. When Schildkraut gets revenge by planting false evidence of his association with Lamarr to open Taylor's eyes to the truth, the consequences turn tragic.Hedy has never been more beautiful and gives a sensitive performance as Manon (yes, that's her name!), a "lady of the tropics" with a sultry beauty enhanced by her MGM transformation into a stunning star who is always ready for her close-ups. Attired in an equally stunning Adrian wardrobe, she's a glittering testament to the power of Golden Age films to give stars glamor with a capital "G". Taylor, attired in white linen suits and Panama hats must have made female hearts flutter as the romantic hero willing to sacrifice all for his yen for Manon.It's a better film than I expected. Joseph SCHILDKRAUT makes a perfect villain, the kind you like to hiss, with his Oriental make-up and oily manner oozing menace at every quiet inflection of his voice. The B&W photography of some artfully designed sets is soothing to the eye and so, of course, is the teaming of Lamarr and Taylor--two of the most photogenic stars on the MGM lot.The script by Ben Hecht helps sustain interest in the storyline, even if it does get a bit too weepy toward the end. Lamarr shows evidence that she could be a very sympathetic heroine if given half a chance.

Robert Taylor whizzes into Saigon with his rich pals and meets wide-eyed, innocent half-caste Hedy Lamarr. The others leave, but Taylor stays behind in his white suit and Panama hat and courts Lamarr, whose mixed racial background makes things difficult for her. For one thing, she can't get a passport. And although Taylor and Lamarr marry and love each other -- well, you can't live on the fruits of love. They run out of money and live in an exotic, run-down hotel so shabby that it resembles the hovel I now live in. Poor Taylor can't find a job either.Lamarr has a trick or two up her sleeve, so to speak. She was formerly a "friend" of Joseph Schildkraut -- the sinister, and most improbably Vietnamese villain your worst nightmare might incarnate. When Taylor gets drunk and passes out, Lamarr "visits" Schildkraut again. He takes her to the opera, Manon Lescaut, this being one of those movies in which the heavy has class.Schildkraut juggles circumstances and the unsuspecting Taylor finds himself offered a job at last. But things darken. Evidence emerges suggesting that Lamarr did a "favor" for Schildkraut, perhaps more generous than simply accompanying him to the opera, and that's how this job offer surfaced.A simple, naive, red-blooded, God-fearing American, true to his principles, Taylor flings Lamarr aside and announces that he's leaving on a ship for America without her. Distraught, Lamarr visits Schildkraut for the last time and shoots him dead. (I can't help imagine the two of them -- Schildkraut and Kiesler -- making jokes in German about their ludicrous Oriental makeup.) Lamarr returns to her squalid hotel and shoots herself somewhere in the body, probably a place that doesn't disfigure her too much. She dies slowly enough for Taylor to return and announce that his earlier renunciation of her was so much rodomontade, that he loves her deeply, and that the two of them are leaving on that ship together. It's only after he tells her this, that he realizes she is dying. "I'll get a doctor!" "No, no. Don't leave me." For the next several minutes, the question hangs in the air: Who will be the first to expire, Lamarr or the viewer? (And this script comes from BEN HECHT, the fedora-wearing, go-to-hell newspaper reporter from Chicago!) I could never get with Robert Taylor (b. Spangler Arlington Borough) either as a man or an actor. He was certainly handsome enough in these early movies, enough so that questions were raised at the time about his having hair on his chest. (His agent produced a photo of a shirtless Taylor to show that he did.) But his features coarsened with age and MGM kept him soldiering on in lower budget pictures for more than a decade. Hedy Lamarr was a stunning beauty, once glamorized by Hollywood's star-making machine. In her first, notorious film, "Ekstase", the teen-aged Hedi Kiesler seemed a little zoftig in her nude scenes, but enormously appealing, even if not yet etherealized.The set dressing is fine though, jaded as we now are with real location shooting, we can never believe that we are actually in French Indo-China. The photography is professional too.

Was Ben Hecht a damnable racist, or does it merely seem so? The fact that this frankly racist film doesn't shock our sensibilities maybe due to its not being that much outside of the norm. Hollywood has been called leftist, but no miscegenation is allowed, not even after the war. And all participants in this charade pretend to have creative freedom, or to desire it. This film could well have been called "No Miscegenation!" at a time when someone else in Europe was crying "No Miscegenation!" Congratulations Hollywood!