Going to the Movies in Tahiti (1934) 🇺🇸

Take a loaf of bread six inches less than a yard long, a slice of watermelon spotted with hundreds of black seeds, a green cocoanut, three or four oranges and a sack of peanuts, and you have, not the ingredients of some weird salad, but the gustatory accessories for attending the movies in the romantic South Sea island of Tahiti.

by Donald G. Cooley

World Traveler and Executive Editor of Radioland Magazine

Add a guitar or two and an empty five-gallon kerosene can and you have the orchestral accompaniment for enjoying the talkies in this languorous isle — a gold-green land rising fresh from a turquoise sea, which for ages has been the goal of romancers and adventurers the world over. The sheer tropical beauty of Tahiti, with its rhythm of romance droned endlessly by the creaming breakers on the reef, has made the island itself the setting for scores of movies in the past. And Tahiti enjoys its present-day talkie theatre the more because of the famous movie ghosts which stalk through its cocoanut and breadfruit groves.

The ghosts which cling about the legendary figure of the great Murnau are not happy ones. "Tupapahous," the natives called them — wraiths of evil capable of carrying their anger across thousands of miles of trackless sea. If you laugh at them as superstition, as Murnau laughed, the natives will tell you in hushed voices what happened to him — but of this, more later.

Tahiti is perhaps the one place remaining in all the world where the movie audience is likely to be more interesting than the picture. Suppose you take your three francs and come along with me to attend a rip-roaring Western in the theatre at Papeete, the island's principal town. We know it will be a humdinger of a show because, along the waterfront, we have seen a poster depicting an amazing scene in a rangeland cattle town.

A man on horseback, in front of a saloon, is training his rifle at an airplane flying overhead. Standing nonchalantly on the fuselage of the speeding plane, his tail fluttering contemptuously in the breeze, is a cowpony. Sitting on his back is a cowboy, waving his Stetson and dropping sneers on his enemy below. Well, you can't wave a poster like that in Papeete without getting results. The town just knows something is bound to happen with a set-up like that.

So, in common with the rest of Papeete, we trek off to the theatre, which looks like a Middle-Western barn. A score of pushcarts with their Chinese proprietors block the road before the entrance, selling a varied assortment of fruits and food as mentioned above. For a franc we can get a green cocoanut to carry into the show, from which we can swig cool, sweet water as the spirit moves us.

We pay our admission, walk in, and find a seat on the benches. We discover that we've been walking on the bare feet of some of our fellow spectators. But they are entirely amiable about it. It involves less effort on their part to let you walk on their dogs than to move them out of the way. On second thought, we decide that "dogs" is a slang expression for pedal extremities not justified in this instance, unless we are thinking of Great Danes.

Mostly the audience is of native girls and their boy friends, with a sprinkling of French officials and a few sailors from the gunboat in the harbor with their town girls. Couples sit with their arms around each other. There is nothing timid or backward about Polynesian love technique. A white flower, the tiare Tahiti, over the left ear, indicates that its wearer is seeking; over the right ear, that he or she has found.

Somebody across the aisle starts strumming a guitar. In thirty seconds the entire audience has burst into song. I recognize the piece. It's one which I could never get any native to translate for me in its entirety — a risqué episode revolving around the escapades of a vahine tinito, or Chinese woman. It must be good, to judge from the spontaneous laughter which always follows it.

Something strikes me sharply back of the ear. Thoughts of wild bees are dispelled when I turn around and discover that it's a watermelon seed expectorated by a grinning young imp a couple of rows back. Nowhere can you find more magnificent spitters than in Tahiti. They have volume, speed, control, everything — including a genuine interest in the art.

That dark opening near the wall over there, above which you expect to see a red exit sign, proves to be the oral cavity of a laughing native.

The picture begins. It's a talkie. Unfortunately, the natives know very little English, but they have a pleasant solution for the difficulty. The guitar orchestra starts in energetically, and with the aid of a little whole-hearted banging on tin cans — always in tune with the intricate native rhythms — the obnoxious dialogue is completely drowned in a flood of Tahitian music.

For a few minutes everything goes disappointingly well, and then, without warning, the screen goes white. The big moment has arrived. While the ancient celluloid is patched together, the whole audience pitches in and sings. A few, inspired by the music, stand up and wriggle into a hula dance while everyone beats time. It's about time for us to take a swig of that cocoanut water.

When the picture begins again everyone is well warmed up. Maybe there's been a little native beer passed around. This is a concoction brewed from wild oranges and fermented honey, and the effect is just about the same as thumbing your nose at Primo Carnera.

The story has advanced to the stage where that good old piece of movie technique, the chase, unrolls before our eyes. The villain still pursues her, and how! The audience forgets to suck its oranges while it gets up on its hind feet and howls. The execrations poured down on the villain must make the heavy's ears burn back in Hollywood. And, my dear, the things they say!

If the film is old enough to break down a dozen times during the evening — as it invariably is — the natives will count the show a well-spent beginning of a night's entertainment which will not end until dawn, tapering off under a glamorous moon to the accompaniment of guitars, soft voices, and dancing in the streets.

There's no such thing as star appeal to a native audience. They get right down to story fundamentals. Garbos and Crawfords and Chattertons mean nothing to Tahiti. As for Mae West, she could learn things from a Papeete hula girl instead of teaching her. Mae must have had her tender years, but in Tahiti they start torso-twisting at the age of two. And I maintain that when, after spending a few weeks in Tahiti, you come home and find Mae's performance in She Done Him Wrong pallid and anemic, the island has done something to you!

It's done things to a lot of people. It killed Murnau. He died in an auto accident at San Francisco, returning from Tahiti with Tabu. But it was really the tupapahous who caught up with him.

"Tupapahous — very bad," said Louis, the native from whom I rented my cottage on the beach. He shook his head soberly. "Murnau, he great man. But he no believe in tupapahous. He make pictures of tabu, but himself, he really not believe. What happen? You see? Gods ver' angry. Follow him. You think auto kill him — jus' bad luck? No. Tupapahous steer that auto. If Murnau know things like natives, he not do things he did, be alive now."

We were walking along the broom road, lined with palms. From the warmth of the tropic sun we passed abruptly into a strata of cool air, chill almost, though the sun still beat down overhead. Louis shivered and hurried through it.

"Bad gods," he muttered. "They not like my talk."

And I wondered if there were not truth in his beliefs. That cool spot in the road was physically real. Perhaps it was Louis' imagination which transformed it into the wraith-like vestment of a tunapahou. I don't know. But perhaps Murnau knows, now.

Murnau's house still stands, a showplace of the islands — yet almost impossible to rent. People come to visit it, are impressed bv its somber magnificence, but shrink from the insufferable feeling of gloom and oppression which enshrouds it. In the sibilance of the rustling palm leaves, the checkered pattern of their shade, is something threatening to those who would live here where Murnau lived.

In the huge dining room stands a table symbolical of the place. It is a vast oval table, large enough for forty people to dine around it. In its center stands a gigantic lamp with a conical shade which spreads out over the table like a canopy. Instead of legs, the table top rests upon four stone gods, carved by ancient Polynesians, which have been the idols in savage rites of by-gone days and have known the ghoulish satisfaction of human sacrifice. They sit there impassive, waiting, perhaps, for other Murnaus who may never come.

But a few miles down the broom road descendants of the men who carved them suck oranges and spit watermelon seeds in Papeete's movie theatre. Perhaps the magic of a reel of celluloid has robbed the tupapahous of their vindictiveness. Douglas Fairbanks apparently has escaped their wrath, despite his absurd and much-publicized statement that you can live in Tahiti on six cents a day.

But has he? Perhaps, above the shattered hearthstones of Pickfair, the tupapahous are having the last laugh!

Reri, famous Follies dancer and star of Tabu, spurned the glamour of fame to return to her native Tahiti to live.

Photo by: Shalitt

Whenever the screen goes white as the film breaks, the audience stands up and goes into a dance. The above scene, filmed during a ceremonial, shows the native love of the dance.

Photo by: Donald G. Cooley

A hula dancer in Tabu, one of the many movies filmed in Tahiti. F. W. Murnau, its director, died in an automobile accident when he returned to the States but natives say evil spirits killed him.

A poster advertising a thrilling western is irresistible to the natives and will result in a packed theatre.

Photo by: Donald G. Cooley

Tahiti, 4,500 miles from San Francisco, is one of the better known South Sea Islands. Papeete is its principal city.

Collection: Hollywood Magazine, February 1934