“It is something like heresy to the generation who revere (rightly) the Flaherty tradition to suggest that the corrupted Tabu is a far greater film than Flaherty's uncorrupted Moana. Tabu has some of the worst scenes that have ever been part of a work of screen art - cavorting natives and a creaking plot, and a heroine with plucked eyebrows to complain about - and its musical score is a classic of kitsch (plaintive, moaning choirs, bits of Schubert, and The Moldau), but it also has some of the most exciting sequences ever filmed. The dancing is superlative - indeed you may cry out in rage at the editor who keeps cutting away from it to a ‘cute' little boy - and there are sophisticated pictorial effects that must be the work of Murnau. German mysticism may be alien to the islands but it does wonders for the movie: the old chieftain of the village becomes as chilly a figure of doom as the emaciated vampire of Nosferatu, and at the end the ghostly little boat does not seem to be sailing like an ordinary boat... it is headed for nothing so commonplace as land. Academy Award for Cinematography to Floyd Crosby.”