Summary
A star-lit Honolulu courtroom becomes the stage for David Harmon’s pyrrhic triumph: the prodigal barrister, awash in rye and rhetorical glitter, eviscerates the prosecution, then slinks to a rats-and-roaches flophouse where salt-streaked neon bleeds across his tuxedo like war paint. Enter his fiancée—steel-spined, velvet-gloved—who dragoons him onto a four-masted brigantine, a floating rehab with canvas wings. Tempest, splintered masts, coral teeth: the ship vomits its cargo into a jade oblivion. One dawn later Harmon wakes on black volcanic sand, skin lacquered with brine, ego flayed. Salvation arrives garlanded in hibiscus: Moana, the chief’s daughter, slated for a crimson rendezvous with Pele’s molten maw. Harmon, still reeking of courthouse hubris, snatches her from the priest’s obsidian blade; the couple flee into breadfruit shadows, trading English common law for taboo-shattering tenderness. Months billow—cascading waterfalls, kava-drenched moons, a child quickened under bread-scented pandanus. Yet the siren call of telegrams, mahogany desks, and a woman who once wore his ring lures him back to a city now calcified in Art-Deco chill. There he discovers the betrothed arm-linked with his erstwhile confidant; bourbon baptisms follow, culminating in a delirious epiphany scrawled on a subpoena: paradise personified waits across the Pacific with a toddler clutching her sarong. He races back, only to find the tribe rehearsing an encore of doom: mother and son poised above the roar of lava, history itching for a reprise. Harmon storms the ritual, flinging Western jurisprudence into the volcano’s maw, and reclaims the family fate tried to steal—twice.
Brilliant but besotted attorney, David Harmon, wins a big case but ends the day in a dingy waterfront flophouse. His fiancée puts him on a sailing ship in an attempt to get him to dry out, but once at sea a storm wrecks the ship and strands Harmon on a tropical island. He rescues the daughter of a native chieftain from being sacrificed to the lava gods and together they live an idyllic life for a time. Harmon is drawn back to civilization though and he returns to his former city only to find that his fiancée has wed his best friend. Another bout of drink finally brings Harmon back to realize that his true life is back on the island so he returns to once again find his beloved about to be sacrificed, this time with their son in her arms.
Review Excerpt
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Frank Borzage’s Aloha Oe is less a narrative than a fever dream stitched from nitrate and salt spray, a 1915 Pacific Gothic that anticipates Moondyne’s carceral lyricism while flirting with the volcanic fatalism later distilled by The Key to Yesterday. Shot through with celluloid sunsets that bleed into the aperture like molten sherbet, the film survives only in shards—four of seven reels—yet what remains is so electrically alive it crackles louder than many a complete talkie.
John Gilbert, bi..."
