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Like his fellow-islanders, Terangi could not stand confinement, and he wanted to get back to Marama. He broke jail so many times that he became a legend. Each time he tried to get away he added from two to five years to his sentence. Eight years had passed before he hit on the scheme of pretending to hang himself so that the jailer would come in and bring the keys. He killed a sentry with a blow of his fist, paddled an outrigger 600 miles back to his own atoll. He had just found Marama again when a hurricane hit the island.
Up to this point, Hurricane has an unforgettable feeling of dark forces closing in around a wild free man. When they turn the wind loose, however, Authors Nordhoff & Hall, Screenwriters Dudley Nichols & Oliver H. P. Garrett wash out their own story. They also wash all the trees, houses, boats, animals and people off the atoll, leaving nothing but the Robert Edmond Jonesish ruin of a church. The hurricane lasts for 20 minutes. It is a technically superb, terrifying combination of miniatures, real storm shots, tank shots, stage shots made with wind machines, all blended with bursts of inhuman music as savage as the piping of damnation. During the course of it Terangi proves his worth by getting a rope to the church, rescuing Madame de Laage (Mary Astor), whose husband, Resident Governor Eugene de Laage (Raymond Massey). stood ready to send him back to prison. When the waves subside, one group of survivors, lashed to a tree, is bobbing on the waves. Another has weathered the blow in a beached lifeboat in which, while the hurricane raged, a child was somehow born. Madame de Laage shows what good breeding can accomplish by surviving the worst storm in cinema history without spoiling her light dress or losing the wave in her hair. She ends in the arms of her husband who, grateful, decides not to persecute Terangi further.
Special effect Specialist James Basevi (San Francisco) learned from hurricane survivors that hurricane sounds vary according to the shape and solidity of objects in the path of the wind. Scale models of buildings and trees were placed in a governed wind stream, and the differing effects recorded. Then Goldwyn engineers stepped up the recording pitch by the same ratio that existed between the scale models and the actual set, got the authentic sound of wind velocities as high as 250 m.p.h.
Associate Producer Hulburd bought Hurricane for $60,000. In due time a friendly letter came from Authors Nordhoff & Hall. They were mightily pleased to know that he had bought their story, they said, because Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had made such an admirable job of Mutiny on the Bounty. Samuel Goldwyn has never been connected with MGM.