Macao Review

Macao (1952)

If you like international intrigue, Macao is a film that will appeal to you. It will also appeal to you if you like the strong silent men of the world who wear white tropical suits and deal with excitement and perhaps danger in the steamy nightclubs of a foreign port. The movie follows the broad pattern established by Humphrey Bogart who played American expatriates for a large part of his career.

Instead of Humphrey Bogart, however, we have the second generation antihero Robert Mitchum who made quite a few of the foreign potboilers, also.

Macao is classified today as film noir; a term coined by the French post-WWII but that didn’t become current around American film buffs till much later.  According to Mitchum and Russell, who participate in a lengthy interview that is included as a bonus feature, the actors at the time merely thought they were making cheap melodramas. 

Today, film noir is more popular than it’s ever been and you can find hundreds of titles now on DVD.

The movie starts out with a brief scene showing the murder of an undercover police officer in Macao. Then it shows Mitchum and Russell entering Macao, an Island, off a steamer from Hong Kong. Mitchum breaks up a fight between Russell and one of her clients. When he gets off the boat, he realizes she had pick pocketed his ID so he had to interview with the corrupt police lieutenant (Thomas Gomez) who lets him through customs because they mistake him for another undercover police detective hunting for the one that disappeared. The lieutenant hurries to report to Dexter and the whole story is hung upon that mistaken identity. Of course it is only a matter of time until they try to bump the supposed detective off. Film noir often uses this “wrong man” idea as a plot point.

The villain (Brad Dexter) hires Jane Russell as a singer for his casino, giving her something to do beside look stunning. Russell, an impressively built woman, sings a couple of blues tunes and is quite entertaining.

Macao was produced by RKO studios which had both Mitchum and Russell under contract. Studio Magnate Howard Hughes had forgotten director Josef Von Sternberg (Morocco) work with Russell to try to get her mystique quotient up, with only modest success.

Von Sternberg proved too strait laced for the informal RKO culture, so he was replaced by Nicholas Ray towards the end of filming.

The movie has a fairly good story, but the cast really make the material better than it is. Actors like William Bendix, Brad Dexter, Gloria Grahame, and Vladimir Sokoloff all were accomplished players with many roles to their credit. Jane Russell does a good job with the thin part written for her and shows her charm and wit. Mitchum, of course, does his patented tough guy that he did in dozens of movies.

The Warner Bros DVD comes in an super thin case, with the well preserved 81 minute Black & White movie in full screen theatrical format. There is a full length commentary and a copy of TMC special production featuring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, great pals in real life, giving highlights of their careers. The two seem genuinely nice and down to earth people.