Pat Jackson (1958)
BFI’s regular ‘Projecting the Archive’ feature gives ‘a big-screen outing to films from the BFI National Archive that deserve rediscovery’. It’s a valuable slot and curator Jo Botting’s introductions are always good value but Virgin Island hardly merits excavation, even though it involves an interesting collection of people. The movie reunited John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, who had recently worked fruitfully together on Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957). It provided a first lead role in the unfortunately brief film career of Virginia Maskell. Freddie Francis was the cinematographer. The screenplay is credited to the director Pat Jackson and Philip Rush: the latter was actually Ring Lardner Jr, who, like some other members of the Hollywood Ten in the late 1950s, was working in Europe and pseudonymously. But the scriptwriter of Virgin Island would have more than political reasons to protect his identity.
The weakly punning title doesn’t refer, except for a single line of innuendo, to human virgins. The setting is the British Virgin Islands, where newlyweds Evan (Cassavetes) and Tina (Maskell), American and British respectively, buy and set up home on an islet that’s uninhabited and undeveloped. The scene-setting, with the same idyllic travelogue flavour as the previous year’s better-known Island in the Sun, is designed to bring out sunseeker longings in the British audience. (The film opened in this country in the autumn of 1958.) Evan is first an archaeological researcher then an aspiring novelist. Tina (Virginia Maskell) abandons what, according to her mother (Isabel Dean), is a promising professional career back in England (doing what I wasn’t clear). Stultified by the stuffy colonialist company she’s obliged to keep on the BVI, Tina enjoys a whirlwind romance with Evan and the British administrator (Colin Gordon) marries them. To build their house from scratch they enlist the help of a genial joker of an islander called Marcus (Poitier).
Ratification of their ownership of the little island is temporarily derailed when they inadvertently facilitate a local smuggling operation and receive alcoholic payment in kind. (There’s a tincture of Ealing comedy in this detail – champagne galore – and the couple’s later unilateral declaration of independence whimsically recalls the Passport to Pimlico charter.) In the end, Evan and Tina are confirmed as owners but decide to go back, with the baby they now have, to a more conventional existence, retaining their island as a holiday home and appointing Marcus and his sweetheart Ruth (Dee) as live-in caretakers. It’s no surprise that a light-hearted exotic number like this (astonishing that Wikipedia terms it a drama and IMDB an adventure/drama/romance) is episodic. It’s no problem either, except that the episodes are consistently tame. Even on the rare occasions when there’s potential dramatic excitement, Pat Jackson pulls back from it. When Tina goes into labour and they try to get back to the main island, the couple’s boat is becalmed; Evan has to swim to shore, through allegedly shark-infested waters, for help. The sharks don’t show. Evan seeks the assistance of Marcus and Ruth: there’s five seconds of suspense as to whether Marcus’s motorboat engine will work. After this, it’s plain sailing to put it mildly. Jackson abandons the scene without even showing Tina’s reaction to the arrival of her rescuers.
The contrast between the set, caricatural acting of most of the older Brits in the cast and the looser, more natural style of Poitier and Cassavetes is weird but that’s the only interest in the Old World-New World collisions of the film. As usual at this stage of his career, Poitier is dynamic but his role is demeaning. Cassavetes tries valiantly to stay true to his acting principles in speaking his lines but the dialogue is mostly so awkward that he tries in vain. (Does Evan’s inability to move anywhere without sprinting there reflect Cassavetes’ need to let off frustrated steam? His filmography says that he went straight from Virgin Island to making Shadows!) The beautiful Virginia Maskell has a distinctive freedom of movement: there’s wit, as well as the echo of drama school elocution classes, in her voice. Ruby Dee is quietly vivid in her small role. The colonial administrator is called Carruthers (truly) though Colin Gordon manages to introduce a few agreeably surprising notes into the character. The instantly forgettable theme song that accompanies the opening titles is sung by Bryan Johnson, best known (to me) for ‘Looking High, High, High’, runner-up in the 1960 Eurovision Song Contest.
The principals first meet when she comes across him digging for artefacts deep in the beach sand, although Cassevetes’s and Maskell’s tone makes it sound as if they’re already acquainted. This could either be a subtle way of signalling that Evan and Tina are made for each other or indicate that the actors were already tired with shooting the film, paradisal setting notwithstanding. At least the way they meet gives rise to a mildly humorous line, the very last one in the film: Tina jokes that, when they return to the mainland, their baby daughter is bound to ‘get to know someone in the sand pit – it’s where you meet all the best people’. That got a titter from the people sitting behind my friend and me. So too, more worryingly, did plenty of other bits of antique imperial comedy. It was almost eerie feeling surrounded by remnants of the original 1958 audience though I doubt the titterers were much older than I am (and I was coming up three when the film first appeared). The seemingly unstoppable current trend of judging the past by the standards of the present has many foolish and infuriating results but it’s hard to swallow the racial and social ethos on display in Virgin Island. You know what you’re in for from the opening shots of a group of little naked black boys, photographed as if they’re an amusing part of the island fauna.
19 July 2018
