I really really hated him!! What does anyone else think?
*HRH The Princess Of All Things Nice*.
Oh yeah. I kept waiting for Julie Andrews' character to slug him a good one.
shareLOL! I'm gld someone else thinks the same! I kept going "ooo you -- bloody----ooooo die!!!! arr" Jerusha (julie!!! hee hee) sould have gone off with the sailor when she could!
*HRH The Princess Of All Things Nice*.
I have to say to all of you Abner Hale haters.....read the book! I read this fabulous book during my 10 day stay in Maui this year and Abner Hale is supposed to be rigid, unlikable and pathetic. His attitude toward the native Hawaiins is meant to represent much of the ignorance the New England Missionaries brought to the Islands and how they tried to sanitize a culture that had evolved over almost 2 thousand years. So the Movie stays true to the book in this way. If you hated Abner Hale, then the director succeeded in bringing James Michner's character to the screen.
shareWeel done to the director and well done to Max von Sydow who played Abner Hale!!
*HRH The Princess Of All Things Nice*.
The funny thing about Abner, for all his unlikeability, he's got a decent read on the future of the islands. He may be telling the Queen that she had to leave her husband/brother out of Christian puritanism - but it is also true that nearly every outside culture is going to find such an arrangement primitive and laughable. As I recall from the book, he tells the Queen that she should organize a police force, issue currency, encourage reading, and regulate the harvesting of sandalwood - all things the islands would have to do to gain respect from outsiders. His belief that the Hawaiians will be supplanted in their own islands may seem like blantant racism - but it did in fact come true. Rafer Hoxworth (Richard Harris), on the other hand, is supposed to a dashing hero, but it is apparent he doesn't give a fig about the islands except as a recreation place for his crew. And for all his love he claims for Jerusha (Julie Andrews), it is clear that fidelty out of her sight would never be part of the deal.
"Quit whining. I evaded your vital organs." --Motoko Aoyama
The uptight, Puritanical, racist and highly unlikeable Abner Hale presented in this film is an authentic recreation of the book's protagonist, and it is to the brilliant Max Von Sydow's credit that we bear with him long enough to witness a breathtaking transformation: he has come to the islands to convert the supposed "pagans" to Evangelical Christianity, and he largely succeeds (despite the devastating cost to their lives and culture)--but, it is HE who is converted by them into a truly loving and charitable Christian. At the end of the film (which only covers about half of the original book's story), his is the character whose soul has been saved. He has been won, as Jerusha predicts, by a loving and merciful God. When he is formally stripped of his pulpit by the very same Brethren who brought him to Hawaii--and threatened with a total loss of sustenance and friendship--how deeply touching it is to hear him say "In this place, I have known God ... Jerusha Bromley ... and Ruth Malama Kanakoa. Beyond that, a man needs no friends."
Rafer Hoxworth fares somewhat better than he deserves--although he spirits away Iliki, he does continue to manifest his love for Jerusha until the end (in the book, she lives long enough to accept the house he has sent over to her and she and Abner live in it until she dies). However, what was once considered "dashing" in movie sea captains nowadays comes across as blatantly sexist and paternalistic.
I have long awaited this DVD release, and cannot wait to see it! Let's hope there are lots of extras and the original director's cut. Although it is not generally remembered today, this was the Number 1 Box Office success of 1966, the third year in a row that the Number 1 film of the year starred the remarkable and versatile Julie Andrews--a feat no actor has ever bettered or achieved since then. (And only Bing Crosby can tie it with his starring roles in the Number 1 films of 1944, 1945 and 1946.)
Trivia: Did you know that the woman portraying Abner's mother (seen briefly and without dialogue, but with a fabulous tear-filled close-up as he leaves the Massachusetts farm where he has been raised in hellfire and damnation) is the same woman who designed "Hawaii's" Oscar-nominated costumes? Yes--Dorothy Jeakins! She has the distinction of having won the very first Oscar ever given to a costume designer (1948, "Joan of Arc" starring Ingrid Bergman) and, in another Julie Andrews-related item, she also designed the Oscar nominated costumes for a little something called "The Sound of Music."
I would like to read the book (never got the chance, so far). I think this movie is considered by some to be anti-Christian, but I don't think so because to me, Jerusha represents all the kindness, generosity, and tolerance as a Christian that Abner lacks. I wish she would have spoke out more against some of her husband's actions, but I guess then she wouldn't have been a loyal wife.
I don't really condone incest, but you all have to admit that the royal family (a long line of incestous marriages) seemed happy and healthy before the Americans came. In fact, all of the Hawaiians seemed okay before they were colonized. Only the royal baby born in the movie was terribly deformed. Although the Americans brought some good things to give to the Hawaiians, I personally think it may have been better if the culture had just been left alone. The Hawaiians were eventually taken advantage of, looked down upon, and killed off by the colonists' diseases.
As for Rafer, true he may not be faithful. But in the film, I felt he showed more affection and concern for Jerusha than Abner ever did. If I were in her shoes, I would have taken the children and left with Rafer without a second thought. But that's just me.
The incest angle is curious but not without real merit--of course, Abner finds it an abomination that Malama and Kelolo have lived together in this way and he forces them live apart; later, he uses the disfigured offspring of Keoki and Noelani as proof that God condemns their "damnable lust." Yet, earlier in the film, the Gene Hackman character responds to Reverend Thorne that he will be eligible to become a missionary because "my cousin has consented to marry me."!!! And, any reading of the Old Testament yields an amazing amount of incest required to propagate the species. Another example of the hypocrisy with which too many supposedly well-intended missionaries went forth to convert the heathens. Right.
"Thank you, thank you--you're most kind. In fact you're every kind."
One thing that bothered me about the movie is that it didn't have the part where Abner writes down the legend Keoke tells about the journey of the first Polynesians to arrive in Hawaii. Yes he does trivialize it and is insulted when Keoke compares it to the Exoddus, but in the end, his dictation of the story immortalizes it, when it likely would have died out with the Hawaiins. And he does hold some respect for it as can be evidenced by some of his remarks in the book. Abner is a little bit more likeable in the book than he is in the movie for his contributions and his tireless work which were more often positive in the long run, despite the difficulties it caused for everyoen in the short run.
Our children are old enough to read icculous.
For Max Von Sydow, he did a great job at portraying the character.
As for Abner Hale, I hated his guts. I kept waiting for the natives to tar and feather him.
Unfortunately, I know people exactly like this who believe they're always right and everybody else is wrong. I don't like those types of people. Too bad our country is run by a lot of people like this.
I was not a Christian the first time I saw this film and I hated Abner. But having since found the faith I see him through different eyes.
He wasn't an Evangelical in the sense that we know it today. In fact he was very much a legalist. He spoke about one being in a state of 'grace' as though it were something to be earned, rather than the free gift of God for all those who would believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour.
I watched the film again yesterday and sadly, in Abner, I recognised my ex husband. Both are men who are fired up to bring God to the unsaved, but in such a manner that would drive more people away from Christianity than towards it.
Jerusha was just lovely though. She knew what it was all about.
Regarding the incest angle, inbreeding causes genetic problems to multiply. There is a parallel to this amongst the missionaries later in the book. The 4 original families intermarried to the extent that most had a crazy person locked away in the attic eventually.
There's an art to making love. And you don't even have a paintbrush.
Hale is exactly the way fundies are today.
He was a typical fundamentalist.
I can't stand fundies. The modern variety OR the ones from the past. They cause nothing but misery for everyone around them the way they try to force their beliefs on everyone else.
Abner Hale made me want to reach into the movie and slap him upside his head. What a sanctimonious prig.
TCall2004, I believe you are using the term Fundamentalist in the secular sense rather than in the religious one.
A fundamentalist is simply someone who adheres to the fundamentals of his faith, whatever that faith may be.
In the case of Christianity, that would include the Deity of Christ, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Atonement.
Unfortunately, in the modern parlance, the word has become misused to describe someone of the extreme lunatic fringe.
As such Hale is not a Fundamentalist. If he was he'd believe in salvation as a gift of unmerited grace; something he clearly doesn't!
You are right about him being a sanctimonious prig though. Slap him one for me too.
Love is never having to say you're sober.
Hale is definitely unlikable and its intentional, but that's largely a plot point to contrast the religions. The Hawaiians themselves were at least as closed minded and rigid in their beliefs (though this is less evident in the movie) and could be bloody for the least violation of their kapu. As humorless and wrathful as Abner is, he does have redeeming qualities, including his complete lack of interest in profiting at the expense of the Hawaiians and a general concern for their physical as well as spiritual protection from the sailors.
Also, there wasn't a lot of comparison between the evangelical Christians of this day and modern Fundamentalists. For one thing the missionaries were an extraordinarily intellectual lot- they read Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc., and all of the ancient pagan philosophers. When they translated the Bible into Hawaiian they translated it directly from the Hebrew and Greek rather than the English versions, and within a generation they had taught the great majority of the Hawaiians to read and write. Most Fundamentalists today are aggressively anti-intellectual.