and since I am not George Bernard Shaw, I am charmed by it. People were always shopping Shaw’s characters and he hated it so much— I think it shows they work as characters, despite his best attempts to make them chess-pieces.
I've only seen Vessel of Wrath (1938), in which Robert Newton does not play the beachcomber.
I might have to go back to watch him as the Controller in the 1938 movie. As the lead, he’s been renamed “The Hon. Ted” instead of “Ginger Ted,” which I suspect was due to somebody looking at Hatter’s Castle and deciding not to put Newton in a red wig again, and if not, well some of the audience might consider an alternate explanation for the character’s nickname.
They might anyway, but public drunkenness and a general disregard of The Rules were probably enough on their own to get Ted shipped off to one of the smaller colonies. Both short-story and movie adaptations make much of Ted carrying on with the native women, but I can’t help but think that what we actually see looks less like active pursuit on his part and more… I’m not sure what, exactly.
In The Beachcomber, Ted and Miss Jones’ one onscreen kiss comes when she’s suffering burnout after losing her latest epidemic-patient and he’s trying to console her— it’s sort of automatic on his part, and he almost immediately steps back and apologizes. She looks at him curiously and confides that she’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man: “I didn’t think I’d like it at all. But this was something quite different.”
Ted promises not to do it again, and Miss Jones stands tiptoe and kisses him on the forehead. They’re interrupted before there can be any further discussion; but whatever the two of them have going on after that, it might not be quite the comp-het movie ending that it looks like.
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People were always shopping Shaw’s characters and he hated it so much— I think it shows they work as characters, despite his best attempts to make them chess-pieces.
I've only seen Vessel of Wrath (1938), in which Robert Newton does not play the beachcomber.
I might have to go back to watch him as the Controller in the 1938 movie. As the lead, he’s been renamed “The Hon. Ted” instead of “Ginger Ted,” which I suspect was due to somebody looking at Hatter’s Castle and deciding not to put Newton in a red wig again, and if not, well some of the audience might consider an alternate explanation for the character’s nickname.
They might anyway, but public drunkenness and a general disregard of The Rules were probably enough on their own to get Ted shipped off to one of the smaller colonies. Both short-story and movie adaptations make much of Ted carrying on with the native women, but I can’t help but think that what we actually see looks less like active pursuit on his part and more… I’m not sure what, exactly.
In The Beachcomber, Ted and Miss Jones’ one onscreen kiss comes when she’s suffering burnout after losing her latest epidemic-patient and he’s trying to console her— it’s sort of automatic on his part, and he almost immediately steps back and apologizes. She looks at him curiously and confides that she’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man: “I didn’t think I’d like it at all. But this was something quite different.”
Ted promises not to do it again, and Miss Jones stands tiptoe and kisses him on the forehead. They’re interrupted before there can be any further discussion; but whatever the two of them have going on after that, it might not be quite the comp-het movie ending that it looks like.