South Pacific [G]

Even when the threat of bombs and raids from the sea and air is ever present, love can still bloom in the strangest of places. None so strange as a little island in the South Pacific, currently occupied by the U.S navy. A naïve nurse falls in love with an older plantation owner, but when he asks her to marry him their differences and certain aspects of his past make her falter. On a neighbouring island, young naval lieutenant Cable falls in love with a native, but a secret and dangerous mission of Cable’s threatens the happy ending for them. 

Well I suppose it has to be said that there is no genre in cinema that is free from a certain amount of crap… even the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals! My major beef with this movie? Absolutely nothing happened for two and a half hours! I’VE LOST OVER TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE! 

Even when the threat of bombs and raids from the sea and air is ever present, love can still bloom in the strangest of places. None so strange as a little island in the South Pacific, currently occupied by the U.S navy. A naïve nurse falls in love with an older plantation owner, but when he asks her to marry him their differences and certain aspects of his past make her falter. On a neighbouring island, young naval lieutenant Cable falls in love with a native, but a secret and dangerous mission of Cable’s threatens the happy ending for them. 

Ok, now the fun of ranting and ripping this movie to shred begins… Oh, where oh where to start? 

Firstly, the writing is akin to wading through tar. Everything happens so bloody slowly! Indeed by the time we get to the actual drama, the secret naval mission, there’s only half an hour of the film left! What was happening in the previous two hours? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Well no, a couple of catchy and then a fair amount of pointless musical numbers. The writers had ideas, but absolutely now idea as how to best execute them, which is a real shame because this a love story set against war! This could have been a tropical Sound of Music if the writers had had any iota of interest in the project. But no, it just felt like a film in which to stick a bunch of musical numbers and play around with the exoticness (and indeed eroticism) of Orientalism. 

Secondly, the performances are all pretty terrible. Fingers could maybe be pointed at lack of proper direction, but it really didn’t feel like the actors were invested in this at all. The central love story between the nurse and the plantation owner was the biggest limp d*** of all with absolutely no chemistry between the romantic leads! And just because you sing about being in love with a “wonderful guy” doesn’t make it so! 

Thirdly, the lighting and colour scheme was a real shambles. I understand that they were trying to convey this sort of siren-erotic-mysticism about the setting but shooting everything in a hells deep shade of purple is NOT the way to do it! The more emotional scenes take on a sepia tone, which sort of worked considering the context, and the love-at-first-sight scenes were like looking at a person through a shimmery jet engine, but it didn’t make the movie feel any more sincere… if anything, it made it all the more cheap, pathetic, and laughable. 

To give credit where credit is due, hats off to Rogers and Hammerstein for their wonderful songbook. A fair few of the songs in this film are real gems such as ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, ‘There is Nothin’ Like a Dame’ and ‘Bali Ha’i’ whereas other ones like ‘Happy Talk’ will just get stuck in your head for days and days. 

Starring Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston, Juanita Hall, France Nuyen, Russ Brown, Jack Mullaney, Ken Clark, Floyd Simmons, Candace Lee, Warren Hsieh, and Tom Laughlin, South Pacific is a pretty terrible film that really doesn’t stand the test of time or even rock the boat on any level. Filled with war, ‘drama’, comedy, romance, and plenty of musical numbers, it’s not a film that I’m going to sit through again… I guess (at the very, very least) I can say that I’ve seen it?