John Ford and John Wayne’s best ‘old man’s movie’ is deceptive — on the outside it’s as square as can be, an easy-chair comedy vacation for all concerned. But Ford imbues the proceedings with poetic formalism, and a nostalgia for a generation in retirement. John Wayne was never so at-ease charming, Lee Marvin does some marvelous clowning, and Elizabeth Allen’s pluck & spirit defuse the rampant paternalism in the screenplay. Peter Wollen was right: this South Seas island is a fantasy Valhalla for the western combatants of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Donovan’s Reef
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1963 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 109 min. / Street Date April 15, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 44.95
Starring: John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Elizabeth Allen, Jack Warden, Cesar Romero, Dorothy Lamour, Dick Foran, Marcel Dalio, Mike Mazurki, Jacqueline Malouf, Cherylene Lee, Tim Stafford, Edgar Buchanan, Jon Fong, Harold Fong, Cliff Lyons, Mae Marsh, John Qualen, Patrick Wayne.
Cinematography: William H. Clothier
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Eddie Imazu
Costumes: Edith Head
Film Editor: Otto Lovering
Music scored by Cyril J. Mockridge
Screenplay by James Edward Grant, Frank S. Nugent story by Edmund Beloin
Produced and Directed by John Ford

Pretty much pigeonholed as a lightweight ‘old folks’ comedy, or an excuse for John Ford to stage comic brawls between John Wayne and Lee Marvin, Donovan’s Reef is actually a major delight. It’s the artistic equal of his late career picture  7 Women, and a lot more enteraining than the bloated Super Panavision 70  Cheyenne Autumn.

Viewers opposed to any John Wayne picture can look elsewhere, but unless the star is fundamenally  miscast, he often did charming things with his screen persona, with or without director John Ford. Wayne is at his most endearing here, serving as a babysitter and playing the sober straight man opposite Lee Marvin, his co-star in the previous year’s  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Marvin was idling in TV work, but earned a major career boost by playing against his tough-guy persona. In this show Marvin gets away with more clowning and face-pulling than anybody since the 3 Stooges.

Donovan’s Reef is an easy-listening, easy-on-the-eyes fantasy for the generation that won World War II — then just coming to terms with middle age. The ‘square’ screenplay includes non-progressive elements of race and gender roles, as one would expect from a filmmaker whose career began back during World War I. John Ford gives us a full tour of his personal themes, that all but define what conservative America wanted to preserve. Nothing progressive here — the John Wayne formula for box office gold was to spank Maureen O’Hara at least once in each movie. John Ford’s sex politics are from the 19th century … but a really liberal 19th century, we’ll have you know. The film glows with warm feelings of stability, and the immutable values of family, duty and fair play.

During wartime Ford was on active duty with the Navy. His movies about the experience depict  dispiriting sacrifices and ordeals split between  tragedy and boredom. The three surviving sailors in this soft-retirement tale didn’t forget an island they defended during the war. ‘Guns’ Donovan (Wayne), ‘Boats’ Gilhooley (Marvin) and Doc Dedham (Jack Warden) were stranded on the Japanese-held Haleakoloha, and joined the islanders in a resistance. Twenty years later, none have returned to the states. Donovan owns a saloon. Doc Dedham married a local woman and founded a hospital. Gilooley returns only once a year, for a birthday brawl with Donovan that’s become a local legend.

The fantasy setup luxuriates in the familiar setting of idyllic South Seas fantasies like  Bird of Paradise. Ford’s film ignores the fact that the Japanese occupation didn’t extend to islands in French Polynesia. The islands they did seize in Micronesia and Melanesia were home to darker-skinned islanders such as those seen in Terence Malick’s  The Thin Red Line. The island of Haleakoloha is a White Man’s Paradise, with the best of what an idealized town in a Ford western would have: a quaint church with a ‘cute’ Man of God (Marcel Dalio), a noble doctor doing good work for the natives, and a saloon that seems to run itself. Donovan owns The Reef, but spends his days entertaining Doc Dedham’s children, whose mother died in childbirth.

The film critics of the mid-1960s canonized John Ford as America’s greatest auteur director, a maker of scores of timeless masterpieces. But Donovan’s Reef was regarded as just another lightweight John Wayne popcorn picture. The one-sheet a poster even depicts The Duke throwing a cartoon punch, like  Popeye.  Yet critic  Peter Wollen gave Reef a notable place in John Ford’s ‘auteur continuity’ by recognizing Haleakoloha as an escapist fantasy —  ‘a kind of Valhalla for the homeless heroes of  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.’  ↑

The island indeed seems like a standard western town reconfigured for a French colonial setup. The whites are in charge and own the land. The Chinese are merchants who jabber in a language nobody understands. The Polynesians are a docile chorus, as in a tourist Hula Show. They seem to exist solely to run to the beach in colorful dresses and sing at the arrival of each sailing ship that arrives.

It’s nothing less than a core American dream of White Flight. The Frontier closed ages ago, the West is fenced off and the seams of American injustice are starting to show in our cities. Haleakoloha is a fantasy escape as in  Lost Horizon, a conflict-free heaven where happy natives do most of the work. Father Cluzeot and Doc Dedham provide for the spiritual and medical needs of the non-white islanders. Otherwise, they seem to get along fine by themselves, like wildlife.

Peter Wollen all but suggests that Donovan’s Reef could be re-titled John Ford’s Greatest Hits. We’ve got the brawling from the cavalry pictures, and a fantasy recap of the South Seas pictures. The ‘native greeting’ ritual of Polynesians singing and bringing flowers in canoes to greet a new ship, is magic from  The Hurricane repeated in  Mister Roberts. The women from  My Darling Clementine are present, the lusty bargirl Fleur (Dorothy Lamour) and the proper Eastern visitor, Amelia Dedham (Elizabeth Allen).

Dorothy Lamour’s Fleur is a fine comic floozy. She carries movie history of her own, for her performances as a sarong-clad native in various island fantasies. Her innocent ‘Marama’ in The Hurricane had a list of things for her lover to bring her from Tahiti; in Reef, Fleur sings a song about gifts her boyfriend brings her. At one point Donovan has to shoo her from his bed. Fleur gets the same level of respect that the Native bride ‘Look’ rated in  The Searchers — Donovan drops her fifteen feet into the Reef’s indoor pond.

Culture critics are quick to condemn this, but we can’t help but be a little defensive when issue-focused articles seek to invalidate old movies based on dated social content. Donovan’s Reef introduces a progressive (for 1963) treatment of racial intermarriage. Amelia Dedham has journeyed from Boston to catch her long- estranged father with some native girl, so he can be deprived of the family fortune. The snobbery may be comic, but the Production Code’s ban on interracial mixing stayed in place almost up to the 1960s.

Even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s wartime musical  South Pacific encountered resistance with this theme. In the film version, a Navy nurse must fight her own prejudice to accept marriage with a handsome, rich French widower, just because he already has children by a Polynesian mother. As in Bird of Paradise, a handsome officer can have sex with a teenaged island girl, but something will prevent them from living happily ever after together.

These racist rules were often explained as concessions to the Southern film markets. Donovan’s Reef softens the presumed offense by making the Native woman that Doc Dedham married into island royalty, and emphasizing this through a ritual pageant. Doc’s daughter Lelani (Jacqueline Malouf) is a hereditary princess.  ←

Of course, playing the Royalty card is a slight cheat as well. Would Amelia have accepted her father’s ‘mixed’ family if the dead mother had been just another island girl?

We really admire John Ford’s camera direction in this picture. Ford was a master of camera placement and cutting; every setup seems perfect, as if it could not be improved. Ford adds a formal quality to his compositions: where people stand, how they enter and exit. Anything with groups is slightly stylized — the ranks of Australian sailors (how did Dick Foran rate featured billing?), the rituals of Leilani’s Christmas parade and the church procession with the kings of Polynesia, China, and America.

The rituals bleed into non-formal scenes. Arrivals and departures are sacred to Ford. When Amelia prepares to leave, most of the cast walks takes a walk with her to the beach, all staring out to sea with reverence.

Ford frames some beach arrivals through a pair of totem pillars, that mark a ‘door’ to Haleakoloha.  ↑  Travelers pause there to enter or exit, as they did at the doorway of Martha and Aaron Edwards. Amelia finds that she can’t pass through the ‘gate’ until she straightens things out with Donovan. The role of The Gate is fully defined in the boating scene, where Amelia and Donovan swim ashore. They decide that they like each other after all, and decide to shake on it.  ‘Pax.’  Just before their hands touch, Ford cuts to the framing shot through the gate. The handshake is as good as a wedding ceremony — they are a couple and Haleakoloha will now be their home. All that’s left of their courting are a few comedy moments… humiliating for Amelia, of course, ’cause everyone knows that the he-bull husband must wear the pants in the family, Pilgrim.

The film’s comedic performances are perfectly judged. Elizabeth Allen really brightens the movie; her protests are never overdone, when being soaked or spanked. The supporting folk — Cesar Romero, Dorothy Lamour, Mike Mazurki — couldn’t be better. Romero enlivens a stock stuffed-shirt French diplomat. When he admires a line of hula girls, he channels the urbane lechery of, say, Claude Rains in  Casablanca.

The film’s stylized rituals pay off when repeated, producing affectionate recognition effects. The effortless ‘just right’ final shot of Doc Dedham’s kids being moved back into his house becomes another ritual, out of a fairy tale. The actors play the gag with their backs to the camera, as Buster Keaton might have done. Ford finds moments of old-fashioned expressionist poetry in other places as well. A rainstorm ruins Father Cluzeot’s Christmas celebration, and one of Dedham’s nurse-nuns sympathizes with him. When one nun steps forward out from under an umbrella, the rain instantly wilts her starched wimple — which droops in harmony with her sadness.

The most telling moment in Reef may be a semi-absurd throwaway. Back in the boating scene, when Amelia and Donovan emerge from the surf, a lone native runs through the frame, handing off a needed towel for Amelia to dry herself. Ford doesn’t try to hide the artificiality of the staging. Ford has created a happy fantasy that we take just seriously enough to get to the next bar fight or touching personal moment. Even in film school, some thought this business was proof that Ford ‘didn’t care about anything.’  We think it’s a reflexive moment similar to an endistancing bit of distraction in a movie by Jean-Luc Godard. Yep, the lady needed a towel, so we got her one. Can’t you recognize a joke when you see one?

The KL Studio Classics 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Donovan’s Reef is a beauty to behold. Kino’s text says we are watching a “new HDR/Dolby Vision master from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative.”  The entire picture is photographed like a classic vacation Sunday supplement; these web images don’t do it justice. In 4K the images not only ‘pop,’ they come more alive. John Ford’s formal framing is often left wide, so the added resolution reveals new performance details — grace notes from John Wayne (honestly) and marvelous clowning touches from Lee Marvin.

The audio was always ideal, sounding like the easy-listening ‘Hawaiian vacation’ music genre that hereditary Hawaiians must loathe. We Haoles have our own fantasy vacation nostalgia for things Hawaiian, which is of course exactly what Donovan’s Reef expresses … even though this is supposed to be French Polynesia. The title tune, according to Joseph McBride, has its origin in an earlier pop song. It always reminded us as a transposition of a song that we had to listen to a hundred times on the old Lawrence Welk Show,  ‘Tiny Bubbles’. It was a hit for Don Ho, hence the Hawaiian association.

Those of us who remember the show fondly as kids may be surprised to see it ‘opened up’ to widescreen dimensions. There’s a lot more to see in the picture, and the formal framing makes a big difference.

Critic, author and academic Joseph McBride has become the dominant interpreter of John Ford on disc commentaries, from back around his terrific track for  The Hurricane. His interpretation of the film’s ‘white man’s escape’ theme brings up John Ford’s earlier  The Quiet Man, in which John Wayne’s conflict-weary Yank finds his own Utopia in an idealized Irish fantasy.

McBride tries not to be too defensive of Donovan’s Reef even while acknowledging that critics in general dismiss it. McBride says that it was indeed a ‘vacation’ picture for all concerned, but we make the case that nobody slacked off, that Ford’s direction is perfectly stylized for his aims. In divvying up responsibility for the story and script, McBride suggests that James A. Michener was a source as well.

A second commentary covers the movie from more of a Lee Marvin angle. Author and Marvin biographer Dwayne Epstein offers more facts, anecdotal stories, and opinions about other John Ford movies, like The Last Hurrah. He just mentions Elizabeth Allen in passing. Her 2006 obituary points to a full, rich performing career.

The disc also includes a rare John Ford item, the short film The Growler Story, from 1957. Ford did a few TV shows in the middle ’50s, but this short subject was produced by the U.S. Navy. It commemorates a submarine commander who was awarded the Medal of Honor. Ford’s son-in-law Ken Curtis stars, with Ward Bond playing support. It’s not particularly well put together, but the sub scenes are interesting for being filmed out in the ocean. Ford’s idea of honoring the Navy wives left behind are some fairly lame scenes with lines of children standing ‘at attention’ for dad. The women say nothing, but wave dutifully as their men go to sea.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Donovan’s Reef
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio Commentary by Joseph McBride
Audio Commentary by Dwayne Epstein
1957 Short Film The Growler Story, directed by John Ford
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 30, 2025
(7305reef)

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