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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