Every time I try to watch \u201cSouth Pacific,\u201d I attempt to coax myself into believing that I will fall in love with the film before the closing credits. And after every viewing, I wind up sighing in disappointment.
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What\u2019s wrong? I always felt that \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d was a textbook example of how not to transfer a Broadway classic to the big screen \u2013 or, in this case, the very big Todd-AO screen, which cruelly magnified the source material\u2019s flaws while also calling attention to obvious effects such as blatant matte paintings depicting the distant island Bali Ha\u2019i.<\/p>\n
\u201cSouth Pacific\u201d was hailed in its 1949 Broadway premiere and this 1958 film release for having a progressive attitude on race relations \u2013 specifically, interracial love between the white men and Pacific Islander women. Never mind that \u201cMutiny on the Bounty\u201d got there first in 1935, with the white men actively wooing and marrying Tahitian women without suffering existential hang-ups over miscegenation and xenophobia. It also doesn\u2019t help that the Pacific Islanders in \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d are as culturally accurate and emotionally mature as the natives running about the Three Stooges comedies that take place in South Seas settings. DVD Talk’s Glenn Erickson said it best: “The Boars’ Tooth ceremony is mostly phony ‘Ooga Booga’ stuff that went out with Frank Buck.”<\/p>\n
Joshua Logan, who co-wrote \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d with Rodgers and Hammerstein and directed the Broadway show, took on the responsibility of directing the film. That was a big mistake. Logan was an uninspired film director who previous works \u2013 \u201cPicnic,\u201d \u201cBus Stop\u201d and \u201cSayonara\u201d \u2013 were mediocre productions that benefitted by having charismatic stars who were better than their material. In contrast, \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d was burdened by a cast that, with few exceptions, didn\u2019t fit their roles. <\/p>\n
Mitzi Gaynor was a vivacious musical comedy performer who shined when her character was expressing carefree joy, but she was a poor dramatic actress who failed to plumb the emotional angst carried by her character’s discover that the man she loves fathered mixed-race children. Rossano Brazzi and John Kerr, playing white men with a fondness for Pacific Island women, were not singers and their respective musical numbers were dubbed by music professionals whose booming voices bore no resemblance to the actors\u2019 speaking voices \u2013 and both actors seemed so disinterested in their surroundings that one has to ponder if off-screen troubles clouded their on-screen work. Only Ray Walston as a scheming sailor and Juanita Hall as the indefatigable islander Bloody Mary gave fully dimensional performances \u2013 oddly, Rodgers insisted that Hall\u2019s songs be dubbed because he felt her vocals were not up to standard, even though she originated her role on Broadway and would go on to appear in Rodgers and Hammerstein\u2019s \u201cFlower Drum Song\u201d without any complaints regarding her voice.<\/p>\n
In fairness, Logan admitted his use of garish color filters to signal emotional cues in the musical numbers were a mistake \u2013 albeit an unintentionally funny mistake that happily distracts from the static segments. But even without the filters, the musical numbers are staged in dull theatrical manner \u2013 they feel like an expensive home movie with the subjects either standing nearly motionless or just walking back and forth while the camera follows them with the slightest of panning movements. Only the \u201cHoney Bun\u201d sequence, with Gaynor at her perkiest and Walston in bad drag, has any significant energy \u2013 even though the camera is often too far back from the actors to properly capture their antics.<\/p>\n
But, hey, what do I know? \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d was the top grossing film of 1958 \u2013 at the Dominion Theatre in London, it ran for nearly four-and-a-half years. Mercifully for this film\u2019s backers, opinions like mine were in the tiniest of minorities.<\/p>\n