DONOVAN'S REEF

John Ford and John Wayne’s final collaboration relocates the battered inhabitants of Ford country to a South Seas paradise, where the war is over and nobody has found a compelling reason to go home. Wayne runs the saloon; Lee Marvin periodically turns up to demolish it. Their ritual combat helps keep time in a community apparently beyond the reach of history, until a proper Bostonian arrives looking for her estranged father—and the discovery that she has Polynesian half-siblings threatens to bring the mainland’s racial prejudices ashore.

Dismissed on release as a Hawaiian vacation with a camera attached, DONOVAN’S REEF is among Ford’s most beautiful fantasies of belonging, and one of his most revealing. Its old sailors have built themselves a refuge from American life without entirely abandoning the assumption that they should run everything. Ford’s affection embraces their makeshift family even as the elaborate deception intended to protect it exposes the shame beneath their paternalism. All this unfolds inside a gloriously disreputable comedy, with Marvin performing spectacular feats of drunken idiocy and Dorothy Lamour refusing to surrender the picture to the boys. The Technicolor is lush, the staging exquisite, the horseplay liable to destroy the furniture. And beneath the racket is the tenderness of an aging filmmaker watching his people grow old together, gathering them for Christmas in a church whose roof won’t keep out the rain.