Donovan’s Reef

#52 in my ranking of John Ford’s filmography.

Essentially just an excuse for John Ford, John Wayne, and Lee Marvin to have a paid vacation in Hawaii while Ford said goodbye to his yacht which he had to give up to help pay some taxes, Donovan’s Reef is a movie in search of a story, meandering from one scene to the next, buoyed almost entirely by its cast and an ending that’s just so good-natured that it’s hard not to say something nice about it. It’s not enough to save the film as a whole, but I didn’t hate the experience of watching it.

A small group of WWII veterans who ended up on the island Haleakaloha during a battle have settled there over the past twenty years. The film begins on December 7 with Gilhooley (Lee Marvin), having been shanghaied into service on a steamer, jumping overboard just off the coast of the island when the boat gets near and swimming ashore. Gilhooley is immediately greeted by Michael Donovan (John Wayne), and the two get into their annual birthday brawl (they share the same birthday which is also the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, an idea that does very little for the film) before getting broken up by Doctor William Dedham (Jack Warden). This is the life on the idyllic island.

Then comes Amelia Dedham (Elizabeth Allen), Dr. Dedham’s never seen daughter from Boston, conceived before the war. She and her father have inherited equal shares in a shipping company, and she’s decided to show up unannounced on Haleakaloha to determine if Dr. Dedham is living a moral life to fulfil a clause in the inheritance that says if he isn’t then he can be stripped of his shares. He, of course, is not living that moral life, having fathered three children with a Hawaiian princess who died giving birth to their third child. Amelia’s arrival, though, coincides with Dr. Dedham going to another island to help with some medical issues, and the captain of the boat Amelia is on radios ahead about her arrival. It gives Donovan the time to arrange for the three children to treat him like their father and move into his small living space above his saloon, Donovan’s Reef.

The bulk of the film is a meet cute between Donovan and Amelia (a romance that made Wayne feel uncomfortable, especially when Ford refused to cast the older Maureen O’Hara instead of Allen, and led to him declining these kinds of May-December romances in his movies from then on) as they start hating each other and grow to love one another. There are entertaining events like when Amelia purchases a bathing suit from decades before that covers her from head to toe as an act of defiance. There’s a swimming race between the two. They go up into the mountains to get a tree that will work as a Christmas tree where Amelia sees the oldest of the three children, Lelani (Jacqueline Malouf), giving homage to the gods of her ancestors.

In the realm of “a place is magic” that turns people’s lives around, Donovan’s Reef, is a minor example because the effort is so confused. They effectively didn’t film with a script, just taking an easy approach to the whole film, and the film feels like it. There’s no strong narrative drive, and Amelia’s falling for the island and Donovan feel disconnected from each other as well as her eventual meeting with her father. Reminding me of how the final moments of Mogambo suddenly eschewed the rambling nature of that film for the dramatic elements it had been avoiding, we get an interesting scene between Amelia and Dr. Dedham when they finally meet, Amelia having learned to love or something, and finding that his explanation for abandoning her as a child is completely fine because he’s a man dedicated to medicine on this remote island and he could have gone home, replaced by another doctor, but he just didn’t. I mean…okay. It was great until the conversation just gets interrupted and never brought up again, at least. This feels like the center of the film, the point where there is the most dramatic potential, and it gets avoided for the longest time because it wants to be a fun romantic comedy. I would be okay with a fun romantic comedy like The Quiet Man, but the central drama isn’t part of that romantic comedy angle. Yeah, this movie is kind of a hodgepodge.

After a completely random fight between an Australian ship crew and Donovan and Gilhooley in the saloon, the movie becomes rather endearing. Lelani is revealed to be the hereditary princess of the island, Amelia realizes the true relationships between the children and her father, and she just comes to accept it. The marriage proposal between Amelia and Donovan is nice as well. The finale does nothing unpredictable, but it does it sweetly.

I kind of wish that they had gone for a more straight forward romantic comedy. The elements are there for a The Quiet Man in Hawaii, but it was just too loosely built with a dramatic element that didn’t really fit. Its ending does a bit to save the film, but not quite enough to elevate it to goodness. As it stands, it’s nice in fits, but little else.

Rating: 2.5/4

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