Canon Decampment: George Montgomery

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Samar

Language: English
Additional Languages: Filipino & Spanish
Year of Release: 1962
Director: George Montgomery
Screenwriters: Ferde Grofé Jr. & George Montgomery
Producers: MAM & Winchester

Cast: George Montgomery, Gilbert Roland, Ziva Rodann, Joan O’Brien, Nico Minardos, Mario Barri, Henry Feist, Tony Fortich, Johnny Cortez, Carmen Austin, Esperanza Garcia, Danilo Jurado, Luciano Lasam, Pedro Faustino, Joaquin Fajardo, Pamela Saunders, Rita Moreno

In 1870 in the Philippine Islands, “a colony of imperial Spain—ruled with an iron hand” (per an opening title), Dr. John David Saunders, an American, criticizes the occupation government and is banished to the prison island of Samar. He manages to befriend Col. Juan Sebastian Salazar, the penitentiary’s commandant, and learns of the former’s aspiration: to organize a trek to a difficult-to-access wilderness abundant in gold. Salazar conscripts the prisoners, with Saunders serving as his right-hand person. Unfortunately Capt. de Guzman, an old army nemesis, gets wind of Salazar’s plan and attempts to sabotage the wayfarers before they reach the promised land.

John Saxon had more film projects, Pam Grier was on the verge of recognition, Marlon Brando was already more famous, but George Montgomery’s involvement in Philippine film production held a few distinctions of its own. Seeking to boost his Hollywood standing after a stint as a leading man whose options had started to decline, he persuaded financiers to invest in a country where their funds could still yield A-scale results. His six projects, all except the first made during the 1960s, were way less than ten percent of his total output as film actor, but they were all modestly budgeted and color-processed; even more significantly, all except the first and last were directed by him. Interestingly, all films except the present one were set during or right after World War II. And unlike Saxon’s and Grier’s projects, which benefited from the participation of local creatives (in contrast with the technicians and performers whom Montgomery maintained), Montgomery’s films played fast and loose with historical and geographic realities. Samar’s false premises bookend its outlandish El Doradoish myth-making: not only does a mountain of gold not exist anywhere on the island, Samar never was a penal colony. Amazingly, even more egregious errors mark Montgomery’s other Philippine-set films.[1] He also did himself scant favors by being a less capable actor than any of his aforementioned American confreres. Nevertheless Samar still endures more than Montgomery’s other films, primarily because its pre-American setting enables him to provide an unsparing critique of foreign occupation, without necessarily looking forward to more benevolent rule by the next occupants, inasmuch as US interest in the islands was still a few decades in the future. His jokester persona also provides a refreshing contrast with the narrative’s actual lead, the dream-driven Spanish officer. And although the always-pernicious demonizing of indigenous tribespeople continued apace here, the practice tended to endure to the recent past in local genre works and is only now encountering pushback. But with the fiction’s sufficient distance from the Philippines’s neocolonial center of power, certain possibly unintended historical resonances unapologetically occupy center stage during their respective moments: the hanging of blood-drained rebels’ bodies from trees, for one thing, and the climactic celebratory pealing of a church bell (reminiscent of the anticolonial Philippine army’s commemoration in Samar, which peeved the Americans strongly enough to confiscate the church bells of the town in retaliation). We may also note in addition that Samar preceded Irving Lerner’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969) and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1972), both better-received El Dorado tales set in the actual locales ravaged by Spanish explorers; for further, immediate, but perhaps futile, intertextual reference, the main character in Montgomery’s From Hell to Borneo (1964), still Philippine-set despite its title, welcomes companions to his property in Mindanao, with its name unannounced but displayed over its entrance: El Dorado, none other.

Note

[1] George Montgomery’s team may have been proceeding from an awareness of the Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm (hence the film’s more accurately situated German title, Der Rebell von Palawan); even then, the Iwahig setup was conceived and implemented during the American occupation. Montgomery’s first Philippine-set project was John Barnwell’s Huk! (1956), a propagandistic effort where he played a plantation owner in conflict with Communist guerrillas, whose organization the characters mispronounce to rhyme with “fuck.” His Pinas career started in earnest with The Steel Claw (1961), which he directed, but which was mostly set on a ship at sea, hence largely exempted from having to acknowledge historical events. In From Hell to Borneo (1964), his character travels from Manila to Mindanao to defend his island property from interlopers, but never really strays away from local territory despite the film’s title. In Guerrillas in Pink Lace (1964), he plays an army officer evading deployment by masquerading as a priest, but gets stranded on an island with a bevy of go-go dancers; their panic is occasioned by news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a few days earlier, despite the fact that the attack on the Philippines was historically scheduled the same day (reckoned in 1941 on the 8th of December instead of the 7th because of the International Date Line), delayed by only a few hours because of cloudy weather over the attack base in Taiwan. Montgomery’s final Philippine film, Warkill (1968), was directed by his regular scriptwriter, Ferde Grofé Jr. (son of the celebrated composer of Grand Canyon Suite), an overt and fairly astute combat film that’s only undermined by a comparatively less-distinguished use of film style compared to what Montgomery managed to brandish.

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