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March 1942: Reap the Wild Wind




















When I saw the start of the title sequence, with the American eagle and everything, I thought that we’d finally arrived at a honest-to-goodness American war movie.

But no: It’s a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza set in 1840.

It’s a romantic/comedic/epic kind of thing, and I had no idea that the plot would get this complicated. It’s very nice watching a movie and not really knowing where it’s going, in a general sense. And it doesn’t happen that often. I wasn’t even sure what genre this was going to turn out to be.

Paulette Goddard is great as the leading character here, and it’s fun seeing John Wayne not on a horse. And looking younger than most films I’ve seen him in.

If you want to be picky, I thing you could say that this film just goes through too many phases: Naval adventure, romantic intrigue, courtroom drama and finally undersea horror. But I like it. It’s huge and unwieldy, but it’s good.

Reap the Wild Wind. Cecil B. DeMille. 1942.

Popular movies in March 1942 according to IMDB:

Poster Votes Rating Movie
396 6.8 Star Spangled Rhythm
877 6.8 The Male Animal
2285 6.8 Reap the Wild Wind
369 6.7 The Courtship of Andy Hardy
397 6.7 Rings on Her Fingers
305 6.5 Always in My Heart
588 6.2 To the Shores of Tripoli
4120 6.1 The Ghost of Frankenstein
808 4.2 Black Dragons

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

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