A contemporary review

This one keeps Carol Reed in his place among the best film makers in the world. With original style and imagination, he excites us with Joseph Conrad's stark story of a gutless white man (Howard), who betrays his friend, his race and himself by his infatuation for a coloured primitive woman (Kerima).

Reed may have adapted Conrad decorously. Some things that can be written cannot be photographed. But it is still realism uncomfortably unvarnished when the white lover-mutters in an embrace of how his paramour’s hair stinks, and when he leads natives in swinging a white trader (Morley), trussed in a hammock, over a fire.

For Trevor Howard's power to convey helpless passion, mixed with degradation and disgust, the word superb should be reserved. The lower he sinks as a character, the higher he rises as an actor. As the sea captain who first befriends and, in a powerful climax, 'completes the rejection of the. outcast, Ralph Richardson’s speeches are brilliant, but his stagey way does not sit kindly with the realism of the rest. Arabian Kerima is a magnificent speechless siren, eloquent with her eyes and her body.

HIS passion for a dark charmer (Kerima) degrades the outcast (Trevor Howard) in "Outcast of the Islands."


Review by John Miles ( 1 September 1952, Adelaide News)