Donovan's Reef is one of John Ford's most misunderstood and underrated movies. On its original release, critics dismissed it as a leisurely comedy done with no obvious purpose other than to give the Ford stock company something not too difficult to do in Hawaii. It is not among Ford's very best movies, to be sure, and its apparent shortcomings, including John Wayne being awkwardly cast opposite a leading lady 23 years his junior, are more obvious than its virtues, but those virtues do stand out over time. Forty years after it was made, it is far easier to perceive where Donovan's Reef fits in, properly and even proudly, with Ford's broader output, and Wayne's as well. One must think of Donovan's Reef as being of a piece with They Were Expendable and Ford's other navy films, almost in the way that Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande relate to each other as cavalry movies with somewhat similar (and similarly named) characters, often played by the same actors in each; but Donovan's Reef is also different in the way it relates to They Were Expendable, from the way that She Wore a Yellow Ribbon relates to Rio Grande, in that Donovan's Reef takes place a generation after the events in They Were Expendable. Ford -- who was a navy man through and through (and held the rank of rear admiral in the reserves) -- and screenwriters Frank Nugent and James Edward Grant were telling a story of the kind of men whose lives Ford had captured in They Were Expendable, and where they were (or where they would have liked for them to have been) 20 years later. The movie is filled with autumnal images referring back to World War II, and to the people who fought it, but it also has a fiercely topical edge, a subplot involving racism, that is almost overlooked today. The movie was made in Hawaii, and most have forgotten that the struggle to get Hawaii admitted as a state of the United States took many years, because the racial composition of the islands' population made Hawaii unsuitable -- in the eyes of many of members of Congress in the 1950s -- as a state of the United States. Ford was cognizant of issues of racism and prejudice throughout this career as a filmmaker, although as an old-fashioned conservative, his ways of addressing them sometimes seem arcane or obscure to modern liberals; but in the final 15 years of his career, in movies ranging from Fort Apache through The Sun Shines Bright to The Horse Soldiers and (most obviously) Sergeant Rutledge, through Donovan's Reef to Cheyenne Autumn, he took on these subjects in ways that the most passionate liberals could applaud. The movie has its weaknesses, mostly as a result of the advancing age of all concerned -- a lot of the "stock company" that would have been in it in prior years, including Ward Bond and Victor McLaglen, were gone -- and the director himself was in ill health (some accounts say that Wayne took it upon himself to check the rushes every day to make sure that everything had been done right). John Wayne was also getting on in years, still, he did well in one of the most effective comic performances of his career, and one of his last truly sentimental portrayals, and slipped effortlessly into a more serious mode when it was called for in the action; and Lee Marvin, Jack Warden, and Elizabeth Allen added a lot of energy to the movie. Over the years, Donovan's Reef has aged very well, exuding passion, sentimentality, patriotism, and the frustrations and the joys of advancing age, everything Ford ever wanted in the movie to begin with.
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