Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

jlwalker19-1 I thought Robert Taylor was very good in Waterloo Bridge. Here, however, he just doesn't produce the chemistry the part should have. He isn't really bad, just in this case rather average.On the other hand, the rapturously beautiful Hedy Lamarr is so perfectly cast in this role. She handles the language accents so well. This film provides an example that those who say yes she was beautiful but couldn't act, that that just doesn't hold water. Her acting here is really quite perfect for the part. The inner conflict of somehow knowing her fate yet dreaming that things could be different comes out in her subtle facial expressions. And of course she looks perfect in the nice dresses and hats. I could see why Bill was trying everything to stay with her and take her away from there. Oh how it is when an American man falls in love with a foreign beauty. See "Act of Love" starring Kirk Douglas if you can.The other actors did a fine job in this movie as well. And of course the cinematography won a well-deserved award. How I prefer the black and white movies.This is really an underrated movie with an underrated actress in the lead. I enjoyed it at least as much as her more famous movies. Sure wish Hedy, parts turned down aside, would have played in more top movies.If there is one downer about this movie, it is rather sad. But the wonderful Hedy Lamarr singlehandedly makes up for it.

bkoganbing For those who don't realize it the Lady of the Tropics we're referring to is Hedy Lamarr who falls big time for visiting playboy Robert Taylor in Saigon. Of course one look at Hedy Lamarr and his romantic goose is cooked as well. But there's is a forbidden love and sad to say the message in Ben Hecht's screenplay is stick to your own kind.Lady of the Tropics was shot while Hedy Lamarr was on hiatus from the ill-fated I Take This Woman. Louis B. Mayer nor any of the other movie moguls believed in letting their players sit idly by. So Lady of the Tropics became Lamarr's second film and her only pairing with that other screen beauty Robert Taylor.Taylor plays a very honorable character here or at least more honorable than most. He's part of a visiting party of tourists off a yacht that lands in Saigon right before World War II starts. As we well know Vietnam was then under that colonial umbrella known as French Indo-China and Saigon was its capital. Among others Taylor is with is his American fiancé Gloria Franklin. Of course the romantic sparks start the second that Lamarr and Taylor catch sight of each other in that Saigon café. Taylor does an unheard of thing, he breaks it off with Franklin and weds Lamarr post haste.Sad to say, but implicit is the message that what you do with exotic beauties not 100% Caucasian is bed them don't wed them. But Taylor and Lamarr don't see it that way. As was said by Queen Latifah in the recent Hairspray, they're in for a whole world of stupid. This was 1939 not 1967 in America. We still had miscegenation laws in most states at the time so the message of sticking to your own kind was in keeping with 1939 mores. This is the exact opposite message the screen would give in 1967 in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner.Taylor and Lamarr are stunning, no two ways about that. The sets showing tropical Saigon are great and the film did get an Oscar nomination for cinematography. But the story is both melodramatic and thank God, dated.

Robert J. Maxwell Robert Taylor whizzes into Saigon with his rich pals and meets wide-eyed, innocent half-caste Hedy Lamarr. The others leave, but Taylor stays behind in his white suit and Panama hat and courts Lamarr, whose mixed racial background makes things difficult for her. For one thing, she can't get a passport. And although Taylor and Lamarr marry and love each other -- well, you can't live on the fruits of love. They run out of money and live in an exotic, run-down hotel so shabby that it resembles the hovel I now live in. Poor Taylor can't find a job either.Lamarr has a trick or two up her sleeve, so to speak. She was formerly a "friend" of Joseph Schildkraut -- the sinister, and most improbably Vietnamese villain your worst nightmare might incarnate. When Taylor gets drunk and passes out, Lamarr "visits" Schildkraut again. He takes her to the opera, Manon Lescaut, this being one of those movies in which the heavy has class.Schildkraut juggles circumstances and the unsuspecting Taylor finds himself offered a job at last. But things darken. Evidence emerges suggesting that Lamarr did a "favor" for Schildkraut, perhaps more generous than simply accompanying him to the opera, and that's how this job offer surfaced.A simple, naive, red-blooded, God-fearing American, true to his principles, Taylor flings Lamarr aside and announces that he's leaving on a ship for America without her. Distraught, Lamarr visits Schildkraut for the last time and shoots him dead. (I can't help imagine the two of them -- Schildkraut and Kiesler -- making jokes in German about their ludicrous Oriental makeup.) Lamarr returns to her squalid hotel and shoots herself somewhere in the body, probably a place that doesn't disfigure her too much. She dies slowly enough for Taylor to return and announce that his earlier renunciation of her was so much rodomontade, that he loves her deeply, and that the two of them are leaving on that ship together. It's only after he tells her this, that he realizes she is dying. "I'll get a doctor!" "No, no. Don't leave me." For the next several minutes, the question hangs in the air: Who will be the first to expire, Lamarr or the viewer? (And this script comes from BEN HECHT, the fedora-wearing, go-to-hell newspaper reporter from Chicago!) I could never get with Robert Taylor (b. Spangler Arlington Borough) either as a man or an actor. He was certainly handsome enough in these early movies, enough so that questions were raised at the time about his having hair on his chest. (His agent produced a photo of a shirtless Taylor to show that he did.) But his features coarsened with age and MGM kept him soldiering on in lower budget pictures for more than a decade. Hedy Lamarr was a stunning beauty, once glamorized by Hollywood's star-making machine. In her first, notorious film, "Ekstase", the teen-aged Hedi Kiesler seemed a little zoftig in her nude scenes, but enormously appealing, even if not yet etherealized.The set dressing is fine though, jaded as we now are with real location shooting, we can never believe that we are actually in French Indo-China. The photography is professional too.

lastliberal I remember when I was living in Vietnam, I was told that Eurasian women were the most beautiful in the World. The French-Vietnamese women that I saw were indeed exquisite. Hedy Lamarr was perfectly caste as one of these women, and her performance in this film was so romantic that one would want to see it over and over.This fine film featured Oscar-nominated cinematography, a script by the great Ben Hecht (Wuthering Heights, Notorious, The Scoundrel, Underworld), and Robert Taylor as the leading man.The story is as old as time and you cannot fail to be moved by the tragedy.