An ultra-dreamy piece of early talkie Hollywood South Pacific jungle exotica. It’s truly transporting. There’s scarcely a frame that isn’t dominated by ocean, tropical foliage, silver moonlight or Dolores Del Rio’s sultry Mexican features (passed off here as Polynesian). Joel McCrea is a visiting white man who falls for a tribal girl after she rescues him from a shark attack by diving into the water with a knife in her teeth and killing the thing herself. He falls even harder later that night when he catches her swimming naked with pre-1934 onscreen nudity in full effect (this film beat Tarzan and His Mate to a scandalous skinny-dip by two years). This heart-warming romance that began with a shark fight and naughty voyeurism gets ever more troubled when it’s revealed that Dolores is the chief’s daughter and her marriage is already arranged to some guy in a grass skirt. Joel’s from New York though, and he doesn’t care about that stuff so he convinces her to shack up with him deeper in the jungle. Meanwhile, her tribe are PISSED OFF over this and decide that the only good use for her anymore is as a sacrifice to their Volcano God. Along with the sexy stuff, this movie also pushed the 1932 envelope with its interracial romance (“If he came home with a native wife, it would break his mother’s heart”, observes one of McCrea’s American buddies). It’s a pre-Code classic.