Typhoon in Macao – Evremond de Brerard, 1860
Have you ever seen the movie Macao with Jane Russell? It’s fantastic. Sure, the plot is kind of crappy, and it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but the photography is terrific deep-noir set in the steamy tropics, and Jane in a tight evening gown walking from one bamboo hut to another is the sort of thing that makes life worth living. Plus, it has Robert Mitchum, one of the great leading men of all time. Men being the operative word. He wasn’t some twenty-five year old punk in a superhero suit. He’d lived a real life before he arrived on screen, and you can see it in his face, jail time in his eyes, a former stevedore’s shoulders.
