A strange, stifled quality hangs over Republic's production of Wake of the Red Witch, giving an appropriate atmosphere to a story in which deep-seated hates and corruption together with twists of fate choke the purity of a true love that has to look to the next world for its freedom.
The basic conflict is between Wayne's adventurer, Captain Ralls, and Luther Adler's Mayrant Ruysdaal Sidneye, powerful tyrannical head of a vast trading empire called Batjack. (Wayne fixed on the name, spelling it Batjac, for the production company he formed in the mid-1950's).
Sidneye is the hungry spider and Ralls the resisting fly from the moment he comes aboard Sidneye's ship for safety, having upset some South Sea Islanders. Ralls boldly offers to guide Sidneye to a fortune in pearls and impudently demands the captaincy of the ship. Sidney strikes a bargain, then has Ralls locked in the hold to teach him a lesson, releasing him when they reach the island where the pearls are kept by superstitious natives in a chest, guarded in a cavern by an octopus.
Both men are attracted to the beautiful daughter of the French commissaire, Angelique Desaix (Gail Russell). She falls in love with Ralls and his romantic vision of the sea as an "empire of freedom" while Sidneye goes to her father and arranges her betrothal to him. When enthusiastic Desaix (Henry Daniell) announces her impending marriage, Ralls is thrown into a deep fit of hateful despondency and, drinking himself into a frenzy, he brawls with the men on ship and advances menacingly on Angelique and grips her by the hair before she can reveal her own ignorance of the arrangement Sidneye had made. Out of bravado, he goes after the pearls, defeating the octopus, and is hero-worshipped by the admiring natives. He sees Angelique again and speaks of the new world of happiness she has opened up for him; but Desaix attempts to dispose of Ralls by having him arrested on a charge of stealing the pearls and Ralls accidentally kills the commissaire in self-defense, knocking him into the flames of a fire.
We learn how Angelique then marries Sidneye and Ralls comes back seven years later to find that her love for him has grown again. When the furious Sidneye sees the danger to his possession of her, he threatens to have Ralls beached for good. Ralls retaliates by taking out Sidneye's ship "The Red Witch" and scuttling it at a secret position with five million dollars of gold bullion aboard, thus gaining a hold over a man whose property means everything to him.
Ralls makes a second visit to Angelique when she has contracted a tropical disease and tries to take her away. But her illness is fatal and she looks on her death as a chance for a new beginning away from Sidneye. As in Angel and the Badman, Gail Russell's fragile beauty is most effective opposite Wayne's brute strength, and her suggestion of a gentle, sheltered innocence too frail to withstand the pressures of life is very moving. She was quite the best of the actresses whose role it was to accept Wayne with shining faith rather than stand up to him in the manner of Maureen O'Hara later on.
Ralls knowledge of the last resting place of the "Red Witch" causes Sidneye to lure him into an elaborate trap. Ralls bargains only for the freedom of his first mate (Gig Young) and Teleila (Adele Mara) whose love reminds him of his own for Angelique, and agrees to show Sidneye the site of the wreck, leaving their differences to be settled afterwards. The sunken vessel is sitting on the edge of a reef about to plunge into the depths and a storm is blowing up. Ralls is the only person bold enough to make the dive. It is all highly reminiscent of Wayne's last scene in Reap the Wild Wind. Beneath the waters, Ralls again loses his life, leaving Sidneye to contemplate both the loss of most of the fortune and (more importantly) his adversary, two of the things that gave distorted purpose to his life. The closing images of film show Ralls and Angelique, side by side, sailing away on a ghostly Red Witch to a life of contentment in the next world ... like Gary Cooper and Ann Harding reuntied after death in Peter Ibbetson and Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights.
Wayne's performance runs on sheer personal magnetism rather than any coherency of characterisation. Drawing out the wild, impulsive nature of the man, his gift for commanding men, his gentle protectiveness towards Angelique and romantic hopes, his brooding over the bitter past, into a complex whole. But it is not as an artless adventurer nor as a romantic that we most remember this film. Two of the most powerful close-ups Wayne has ever had stamp him foremost as a man of violence. First when, in a drunken sweat, he advances on Sidneye's man Loring (Jeff Corey) in his cabin and beats the the man up and when he advances on Angelique as his apparent betrayer and seems set to kill her.
| Captain Ralls | John Wayne | |
| Angelique Desaix | Gail Russell | |
| Sam Rosen | Gig Young | |
| Teleia Van Schreeven | Adele Mara | |
| Mayrant Ruysdaal Sidneye | Luther Adler | |
| Harmenszoon Van Schreeven | Eduard Franz | |
| Capt. Wilde Youngeur | Grant Withers | |
| Jacques Desaix | Henry Daniell | |
| Antonio "Ripper" Arrezo | Paul Fix | |
| Captain Munsey | Dennis Hoey | |
| Mr. Loring | Jeff Corey | |
| Doctor Van Arken | Erskine Sanford | |
| Va Nuke | Duke Kahanamoku | |
| Prosecutor | John Wengraf | |
| Red Witch Seaman | Myron Healy | |
Shooting from mid-July to late October/early November 1948.
Released March 1,1949 (US); June 5, 1949 (Great Britain).
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