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Taufan
English Title: Typhoon
Language: Malay
Year of Release: 1957 / B&W
Director: Teodorico C. Santos [as T.C. Santos]
Screenwriter: T.C. Santos with dialogues by S. Sudarmadji
(From the story “A Storm on Pearl Island” by Chua Boon Hean)
Producer: Malay Film Productions
Cast: Ziaton, Ahmad Mahmud, Salleh Kamil, Mariani, Saamah, Aziz Sattar, Baby Suraini, Nyak Osman, Salbiah Kardi, Shariff Dol, Fatimah Osman, Ali Fijee, Jamilah, Mohd Rafee, Omar Suwita, Mustarjo, Kemat Hassan, H.M. Busra, Ibrahim Pendek, Mohd. Hamid
The fishermen of a coastal kampung or traditional village catch so little fish after a strong typhoon that they borrow money from Hamid, who takes advantage of their situation by charging usurious repayment rates. Hamid has set his sights on Fatimah, who has to attend to her father who’s ill but owes Hamid money; Hamid offers her medical care if she agrees to be his mistress, abusing his own wife when she criticizes his intention. He intends to get rid of Amir, Fatimah’s betrothed, by promising to write off Fatimah’s loan if Amir’s able to bring him a large pearl from the shark-infested waters. Fatimah protests, but Amir is determined to win her from Hamid and proceeds with the life-threatening mission.
One of the more highly regarded talents of the First Golden Age, with over forty titles to his name as director and several more as scriptwriter (including Gerardo de Leon’s Sisa), active through the 1970s—yet the only still-available Teodorico C. Santos-directed film, apart from Fernando Poe Jr.’s recently remastered koboy entry …At Sila’y Dumating (And They Came, 1967),[1] was the one he made for Sir Run Run Shaw. The material is old-fashioned melodrama with musical interludes, enhanced by the rural setting and made even more exotic by a cast more reticent and graceful than what we might find in a Philippine production. Santos benefited from an apparently bigger budget than Philippine-set projects could allot, and made sure none of it was wasted: any plot excuse to follow pearl-diving characters is realized with impressive underwater photography, while Santos frames and blocks his island-set actors with sufficient evidence of technical lessons learned on Gerry de Leon projects. The propensity for excess must have been the national value he brought over; it provides him with a means to revitalize the genre’s conventions and gives the story a nervy edge, like a finely woven fishnet stretched to the point where it could easily tear in several places.
Note
[1] The once-popular problematic Western genre was, in simplistic terms, a commemoration of the expansion of Euro-derived civilization from Atlantic-coast US territories into the “wild” Pacific states; the expansion of the US into independent countries such as Hawaii and Guam, leading to the successful colonization of the Philippines and unsuccessful attempt in Vietnam, may be seen as an extension of this impetus. The very first acknowledged narrative film story, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), partook of elements that were identified with Westerns, although the overseas popularity of the genre, including the Philippines’s koboy (from cowboy) samples, may be traced to so-called Italian spaghetti Westerns. Ironically these were acknowledged as influenced by—plagiarized, in fact, from—an Asian hit, Kurosawa Akira’s Yojimbo (Bodyguard, 1961), which in turn led to such coinages as Easterns or ramen Westerns. Teodorico C. Santos’s …At Sila’y Dumating is saddled by excessive psychotic villainy, with FPJ himself arguably modifying the koboy elements in his own Panday film series and finally creating a historically inflected peak with Ang Maestro (The Master, 1981).
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