Maru Maru (1952)

Salvage diver Gregory Mason (Errol Flynn) is living and working in the Philippines with his behind the scenes work partner and friend Andy Callahan (Richard Webb). Or really, former friend, for Mason’s exclusively commerce-driven (or really, money-grubbing) agenda with a ruthless streak fathoms deep seems to have put so much pressure on Callahan, he has fled into the life of a binge drinker. The friendship is certainly not strengthened by the fact that Callahan’s wife Stella (Ruth Roman) is a former girlfriend of Mason’s and clearly still has feelings for him, because we all know that hateful glowers in 50s movies always mean romantic and sexual passion, and she’s quite the glowerer. Though she also tends to defend Callahan against Mason. There’s really only one good point on Mason’s books at the beginning of the movie: that he’s basically adopted his “house boy” Manuelo (Robert Cabal) as well as Manuelo’s little brother, treating the kids rather more fatherly than you’d expect from the guy, or a white colonialist boss towards brown people.

Still, it is not a complete surprise that Mason is the police’s main suspect when Callahan is suddenly murdered. We the audience know he’s innocent though. Mason is the kind of bastard who still does have some things he won’t do, even for money.

For as it turns out, there’s a lot of money connected to Callahan’s death in form of a treasure sunk during the war. Various people shady (Raymond Burr in his patented screen heavy stage projecting an impressive amount of sleazy punchability) and not so shady (Georges Renavent) are interested in that treasure, obviously, and so will be Mason.

While most people who think about the director at all will connect him with great Westerns and the best US giant monster movie (perhaps of all time, most certainly the 1950s), Them!, Gordon Douglas was the kind of classic journeyman filmmaker who made all kinds of film in all kinds of genres, typically doing them very well indeed.

Sometimes, as in the case of Maru Maru, he even made films that collected all kinds of genres in a single movie. This is a colonialist diving adventure movie, mixed with quite a bit of noir, melodrama, and thriller tropes, culminating in a redemption with not very subtle religious overtones (which, on purpose or not, really fits the Filipino setting very well). It’s also a film made by a filmmaker who had no problems whatsoever to take all the bits and pieces of diverse genre tropes and make a coherent – sometimes exciting, usually at least interesting – movie out of them. As is only logical, Douglas does this by focussing on the overlaps between the genres he’s using here, finding the character types they share and letting them interact in a sensible manner, leading the audience through the plot via Flynn’s redemption arc.

Visually, there’s a lot of noir on screen here, so the Philippines become a place drenched in more shadow than light, populated (as is traditional in colonialist adventure and to me always suggesting a silent admittance to the hypocrisy of colonialist betterment rhetoric) by people who are haunted by mistakes, greedy for money and generally shady or at least morally ambiguous, quite independent of their skin colour. Douglas’s treatment of his non-white (who are mostly even played by actors of colour, if not always the exact right one) characters is better than you get in most of these films, at least in so much as he treats them as like everyone else on screen – characters that stop being complete genre tropes because director and script bother with giving them enough dimension to let them breathe like people.