The Scavengers - 1959

In this B-movie tale of foreign intrigue, 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 suggest that he leave for good.

Determined, Stuart follows Marion to Macao, where 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 a 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 violence in an alley, only to be repeatedly judo-thrown for his trouble. When the police arrive, 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 production cheapness and swipes from The Maltese Falcon and other noir films of the past. The low budget, despite the exotic on-location settings (mainly filmed at Premiere Studios in Manila, Philippines), detracts from the production, sometimes operating at a level of TV-episode brevity and frugality, with lots of noise from scenes in which the usual "looping" wasn't performed. It sounds like whatever was captured on a take has been used, even if its loaded with the noise of shoes scraping on the ground, bumps and other audio distractions. Cinematography is good 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 visuals and well done stunt sequences.

Carol Ohmart stands out with a genuine Hollywood presence as the female lead, while Vince Edwards gives an energetic performance as a man caught between bitterness and attempts at self-reformation and the reformation of his estranged wife who is in way over her head with a serious narcotics addiction. As a husband, Stuart can’t fully abandon the wreckage of his marriage to this femme fatale, yet Ohmart’s bad girl isn’t entirely bad, and by the end of the tale is a pitiable victim searching for a way out, even if that way out is self-destruction.

In a way the theme of The Scavengers for much of the cast is a story of embracing or avoiding self-destruction, with self-delusion a close second (such as 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). Against that is Stuart's sometimes Hong Kong girlfriend Marissa (played by Tamar Benamy, who unfortunately often sounds dubbed), but as a character is far younger but more aware than the American characters in the cast. That's a lot going on for a barely B-level movie, and that John Cromwell and Eddie Romero can squeeze in these elements is a witness that there are things more memorable about The Scavengers than the penny-pinched production and some unintended laughs would otherwise suggest.

The Scavengers, the title of which refers to a line given by Vic Diaz early on in which he says he and the others are all "scavengers" searching for long hidden government bonds, "picking up the pieces" after his country (China) was "strangled by idealists." The film is also known as Los buitres de Macao ("The Vultures of Macao") and was re-released in 1963 as City of Sin.

What's Recent

An older review of Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation

Original Page October 20, 2024