CROSS WINDS

US, 1951, 95 minutes, Colour.
John Payne, Rhonda Fleming, Forrest Tucker, Alan Mowbray, John Abbott.
Directed by Lewis R. Foster.

Cross Winds is a conventional action adventure, with a New Guinea setting, a group of people all trying to find lost gold, diving under the waters of New Guinea to recover it. John Payne is the hero, Rhonda Fleming the leading lady, Forrest Tucker the villain.

The film was written and directed by Lewis R. Foster, a prolific writer as well as a film director from 1929. During the first half of the 1950s he made a series of action adventures with Rhonda Fleming and the leading man being either Ronald Reagan (The Last Outpost, Hong Kong, Tropic Zone) or John Payne (The Eagle and the Hawk, Passage West).

1. An entertaining popular adventure? Of the 50s? Style and treatment? Now?

2. The adventure ingredients: location, New Guinea, greed and gold, adventurers, disillusioned heroine, villains? Particular ingredients of treatment e.g. action sequences? Final confrontation and deaths of villains? Romance?

3. Colour photography, the atmosphere of New Guinea? Music? Theme song?

4. How credible was the plot? A credible New Guinea? Administration, adventurers, head hunters? Sufficient for these purposes? How realistic did it have to be?

5. Steve as hero? War background, taken in, his explaining himself to Katie and the bond between them as wanderers? The false arrest? Reaction to the trial and imprisonment, to get the boat back? The encounter with Duke and Mousy? The expedition, his reaction to the plots and counterplots? The heroism in rescuing Katie? The deal with Jumbo and the getting of the gold? Coping with Katie’s disillusionment? The final fight, the deaths? The inevitable happy ending? A suitable hero for this kind of film?

6. Katie as the appropriate heroine? The explanation of her background as widow, war, work, presence in Port Moresby? Her drinking, love for adventure? Her reaction to Nicky? Going on the flight? The importance of the exhilaration of being on Steve’s boat and the effect on her? Being rescued, feeling that she had been used? Her participation in the final fight, happy landing,? A sufficiently credible heroine?

7. Nicky as villain and his death? Jumbo and his smooth talk and double dealing? His making good at the end? Duke and Mousy and the comedy about the remittance men? But the sinister comedy because of their murders? Their double deals?

8. Comment on the sailing sequences, the fights with the hunter, the underwater photography?

9. Themes of greed, good and evil, adventure? Romance? Why the popular appeal of this kind of adventure?