Merle Oberon spent her life diverting attention away from the truth of her birth and racial background. Along with the varying fabrications related to her ancestry and childhood, the roles she would choose throughout her long career almost always served to underscore her presumed and respectable British whiteness, a whiteness rather contradicted by her dark, markedly unusual - exotic - beauty. But by the middle of the Forties, at a time when Hollywood was producing a spate of A-Thousand-and-One-Nights-style Technicolor extravaganzas, she took the role of the Persian princess Delarai in Walter Wanger's lavish production of "Night in Paradise". In spite of how well the settings and Travis Banton's elaborate and fantastical costumes complemented her particular beauty, the belated venture into full-on exoticism was not a success, and lost Universal Studios almost a million dollars at the box office; a later critic described it as a kitschy "Maria Montez vehicle without Maria Montez".
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| On a "leaning board" between scenes. |
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| The film was in Technicolor, after all. |
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Merle Oberon should have celebrated her exotic good looks, not hidden her origins. Other actresses lied about their mothers being from Indonesia or their fathers from Brasil, to enhance their exotic nature. The wardrobe and jewellery staff must have adored her.
ReplyDeleteHow gorgeous! I wish I could just touch those fabrics! I've never heard of her co-star Turhan Bey and wonder if a different star would have helped the film? Thanks for the pics. Denise
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ReplyDeleteDuring the film career of Merle Oberon she received some of her best notices in such diverse genre films: Dark Waters (1944, United Artists) receiving sturdy notices as Leslie Calvin, an emotionally shaken survivor of a torpedoed ship on which her parents drown. This film was of the sleeper hits of 1944. But it wasn't until Merle was cast in Desiree as the mature courtesan Josephine Beauharnais who marries Napoleon Bonaparte (Marlon Brando) and becomes Empress of France, but is then cast aside when she proves unable to produce on heir to the throne. Many critics singled her out for her subdued in a quiet way performance as the pitiful, aging mistress-wife but she looked most effective wearing the costumes with superb chic by Rene Hubert.
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