The Hurricane

I Tivo'd an old movie of my great-grandmother's on TCM. It's called The Hurricane, and was made in 1937. I didn't get a chance to watch it until last night, when I'd already had a few glasses of wine. And it is one fucked up movie.

It's about a half naked hottie who's persecuted by an evil safariman because he's in love with a native woman incapable of forming complete sentences, played by the lovely Dorothy Lamour. My great-grandmother, Mary Astor, plays the safariman's wife, and her name, get this, is Germaine De Laage. Anyways, the end of the movie climaxes with some of the most amazingly creepy special effects I've seen in a movie. It is actually the first movie in the Disaster genre. When I read granny's autobiography, she wrote a lot about the making of this film. They brought in insane industrial fans and tied the actors to the trees, in between takes, the make up artists would have to cover the tiny cuts all over the actors' faces because of how fast sand and water were blasted in their faces.

These were the old days of filmmaking, and it looks, horrifically enough, like a real motherfuckin hurricane. And nobody survives. Except of course, Dorothy Lamour, half naked hottie, and their halfie baby Tita. And my great-grandmother of course, who rescues the interracial family from the wrath of her husband with the last line of the movie.

"It's only a floating log."