Swimming With Wholphins

"Wholphin No. 10" stays afloat with impish zombie films, animated freakouts and a 1989 gem.

Another paradigm that’s been lurking under the radar a bit: the Warner Archives, Warner’s “DVD on demand” campaign, which presses discs only when they’re ordered, and with no frills whatsoever. The releases are strictly semi-forgotten library titles that no one in Burbank figured could turn a dime in any other way, which of course means they’re obscure, too-little-seen packets of cinephilic swooniness, even if, as in last season’s release of several old Marie Dressler comedies, the films weren’t much to crow about in the end.

This month it’s a prize, the much-rumored, Oscar-awarded aberration “White Shadows in the South Seas” (1928), directed by Industry journeyman “one-shot” W.S. Van Dyke on location in Tahiti. Listed by both David Lean (sure) and Luis Buñuel (what?) among their Top Ten favorite films, this gauzy parable of Western civilization — the shadows of the title — corrupting and ruining the indigenous island peoples of the Pacific is a political knot, at once idealizing and simplifying the gorgeous Islanders just as Murnau’s “Tabu” did three years later, but also making no bones about the poisonous impact of American commerce, greed and “progress” to a degree that makes perfect go-green, eat-local sense today.

Ignore the preachy intertitles, and the authentic jungle imagery shines the way not only for Murnau but Maya Deren (in Haiti), Straub/Huillet and Herzog. The story is simple and corny (a drunken doctor finds love and purpose once he’s shipwrecked and accepted into a Marquesan tribe), but the textures are continually surprising — for one thing, the film could hardly be sexier, thick with soft-focus maidens cavorting in a waterfall, and a sigh-worthy silhouetted scene in which the virgin at the story’s center (Raquel Torres) stands in a canoe, undresses, and uses her sarong as a sail.

Gold-tinted as if it were caught under a perpetual harvest moon, Van Dyke’s movie (which is credited as “a camera record” of a bestseller, “compiled” by two writers) is an escapist daydream, and gloats as much about tropical cuisine as it does about sex (the roast octopuses, lobsters and sea turtle!). But, thanks to the corpulent white slobs willing to kill for a freshly-dived pearl, and the shadows they’ve cast across native peoples in the more than 80 years since, it’s also terminally sad.

“Wholphin, No. 10″ (McSweeney’s) and “White Shadows in the South Seas” (Warner Bros.) are now available on DVD.

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