Tonight's Movie: Raw Wind in Eden (1958) - A Kino Lorber Blu-ray Review

RAW WIND IN EDEN (1958), an adventure-suspense film starring Jeff Chandler and Esther Williams, has just been released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.

I'm quite a fan of both actors, and this title had eluded me for years. While I ended up feeling that the movie could have been quite a bit better, I was delighted to finally see it thanks to Kino Lorber.

Esther plays Laura, a model working in Italy. She also seems to be something of a "good time girl," and when playboy Wally (Carlos Thompson) delivers the news that she's been dumped by her married boyfriend, she agrees to fly with Wally to join a private party on a yacht.

The small plane crashes en route, but Laura and Wally survive, finding themselves on a Mediterranean island in the middle of nowhere. The island's only inhabitants are Erbano (Eduardo De Filippo), his daughter Costanza (Rossana Podesta), and a "beachcomber," Moore (Chandler).

There's also a young guy (Rik Battaglia) who randomly shows up at the island in a small boat and has shootouts with Moore.

No one is expected to stop at the island for weeks, and Laura is baffled when the distress flag she posts, hoping to attract attention from a passing ship or plane, repeatedly disappears.

Laura and Wally also discover a boat on the island, but when they try to fix it up in order to leave, their repairs are mysteriously undone...

Meanwhile there are varied romantic developments and complications among most of the island's inhabitants, with the young man in the boat factoring in as well.

The leads and location shooting off the Tuscan coast (by Enzo Serafin) are gorgeous, but Elizabeth and Richard Wilson's screenplay dawdles and goes nowhere in a hurry. Both the plot and relationships move very slowly in this 93-minute film; there's a bunch of action near the end but frankly it didn't all quite make sense for me.

I was also disappointed with the performance of Podesta, who had zero chemistry with Chandler, though granted the script didn't give her much to work with.

The elements had potential but while I was hoping for another minor gem such as Kino Lorber's release of Williams' THE UNGUARDED MOMENT (1956) from a couple years before, which I loved, it was not to be. You can't win 'em all.

A funny thing is that while I was watching my husband arrived home and asked from the other room "Why do I hear Paul Frees?" I was confused by the question, given Frees wasn't listed in the small cast, but when he looked at the screen he pinpointed Thompson as being dubbed by Frees. It took some Googling, but according to Dennis Seuling's review for The Digital Bits, he was correct!

RAW WIND IN EDEN was directed by the film's co-writer, Richard Wilson.

Kino Lorber's good-looking Blu-ray is from a new 2K master. Disc extras consist of the trailer; a gallery of five additional trailers for other films available from Kino Lorber; and a commentary track by David Del Valle and Daniel Kremer.

Thanks to Kino Lorber for providing a review copy of this Blu-ray.

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