The Scavengers - 1959

Ex-air force pilot Stuart Allison (Vince Edwards), weary of his life as a smuggler in the Far East, spots his wife Marion (Carol Ohmart), who has been missing for six years, boarding a ferry from Hong Kong to Macao. Desperate to reach her, Stuart frantically fights his way through the dockworkers, only to be detained by the Hong Kong police. The authorities, fed up with his record of trouble in their city, politely but firmly suggest that he leave for good.

Stuart goes to Macao to search for Marion. There he encounters Casimir O'Hara (played by cheerful and flamboyant Vic Diaz) who says about his name "not really a strange name if you're Chinese, Filipino and Irish," who is the exact man Stuart saw on the dock watching his wife as she left on the ferry. Stuart suspects Casimir’s involvement with Marion and confronts him with physical force to get the information he wants, only for Stuart to be repeatedly judo-thrown. The police quickly arrive and Casimir fabricates a story about being attacked by muggers and credits Stuart for saving him. Casimir’s sympathy is telling, he is an "agent of the Chinese Nationalist Government" and knows far more about Marion’s situation than Stuart can grasp, and it takes the rest of the film for Stuart to catch up.

The Scavengers is marked by flashes of quality direction (John Cromwell) and thoughtful writing (Eddie Romero), suggesting a better film struggling beneath the surface of the B-movie production cheapness and swipes from The Maltese Falcon and other noir films of the past. The low budget, despite the exotic on-location settings (Premiere Studios in Manila, Philippines), detracts from the production, with The Scavengers sometimes operating at TV-episode brevity and frugality, with lots of noise, sounding like whatever was captured on a take has been used, even if it's noise of shoes scraping on the ground, bumps and other audio distractions.

Cinematography is good, though, and there are an endless number of night-scenes that are carefully lit and it is a shame that there aren't any good quality prints (that I know of) for The Scavengers which has good, solid visuals and well done stunt sequences.

Carol Ohmart stands out with genuine Hollywood presence as the female lead, while Vince Edwards gives an energetic performance as a man caught between bitterness and personal self-reformation and trying to rescue his estranged wife who is in way over her head with a serious narcotics addiction. Stuart can’t abandon the wreckage of his marriage, but he (and the audience) watch Ohmart’s broken bad girl slipping from femme fatale to pitiable victim searching for a way out from a life of needles.

The theme of The Scavengers is embracing or avoiding self-destruction, with self-delusion a close second. Part of that is portrayed by a very good Richard Loo as a Chinese general turned crime boss hunting for stolen bonds, a journey that has taken years and endless trips around the Orient, searching for the "big score." But not everyone is damaged and self-destructive, though, Stuart's sometimes Hong Kong girlfriend Marissa (played by Tamar Benamy, who sounds dubbed), is a character far younger but more aware than the older characters in the cast.

There's a lot going on in this barely B-level movie, and John Cromwell and Eddie Romero squeeze in a lot of elements that would be more at home in a better budgeted version of The Scavengers instead of this penny-pinched production that struggle to push its way out of the limitations weighing it down.

The film title refers to a line given by Vic Diaz early on in which he says he and the others are all "scavengers" searching for the long hidden government bonds, they are just "picking up the pieces" after his country (China) was "strangled by idealists."

This film is also known as Los buitres de Macao ("The Vultures of Macao") and was re-released in 1963 as City of Sin.

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Original Page October 20, 2024 | Updated October 7, 2026