GROSS/49 1958 - South Pacific - apocalypse then

It's a delirious, not to say demented, movie - a kind of Eisenhower acid trip.

Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

SOUTH PACIFIC, director JOSHUA LOGAN, screenplay PAUL OSBORN, based on South Pacific by Oscar Hammerstein II and JOSHUA LOGAN, music by RICHARD ROGERS, cast ROSSANO BRAZZI, MITZI GAYNOR, JOHN KERR, FRANCE NUYEN, RAY WALSTON, JUANITA HALL, production SOUTH PACIFIC ENTERPRISES, 1958, 157 MINUTES.

South Pacific is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some strange movies. It was a massive hit: the top-grossing Hollywood movie of 1958. It sat at number 1 for rentals in the US for months (it played continuously at a cinema in London for four-and-a-half years). A huge cultural phenomenon (the stage version is on somewhere near you as I write this) and a cinema oddball of the highest order.

Anyway, let’s go through this. I can’t find the power supply and my laptop is on about half charge. If this stops abruptly you’ll know what happened.

I cannot find a single good review. In fact I can hardly find any reviews. None of my favourites went near it. Was it labelled ‘poison’ or something? Did the odd double-miscegenation storyline (we’ll get to that in a minute) put everyone off? In one of her radio broadcasts Pauline Kael did say: “South Pacific is seventh in Variety’s list of all-time top grossers. Do you know anybody who thought it was a good movie?” The Chicago Tribune’s Roger Siskel wrote, in a capsule review: “Joshua Logan's South Pacific, now on neighborhood and suburban screens, is embarrassing.”

There’s an odd double-miscegenation storyline. Eisenhower-era civil rights was different from Kennedy and Johnson civil rights. The Civil Rights Act is still six years away: Hollywood’s tolerance and co-existence game is still pretty unsophisticated. In South Pacific two of the lead characters are tormented by their own reflexive racism. One (John Kerr as Lieutenant Joseph Cable) can’t bring himself to marry the Polynesian girl offered him by her mother because, well, he’s a racist. Another (Mitzi Gaynor as Chief Nurse Nellie Forbush) can’t bring herself to marry the handsome, wealthy French planter she’s fallen for because he has mixed-race children. There’s something honest and exploratory about the way they express their fears, though. They speak openly about how bad they feel, about the urgency of overcoming their prejudices.

The film’s thesis, laid out in the song ‘You’ve got to be carefully taught’ is nurture over nature in its most direct form. A narrative of this sort would be called ‘woke’ today and there is something forcefully metropolitan-elite about the message. Nellie blames her backward Arkansas upbringing for her moral defect, John sings that he was taught “…to hate all the people your relatives hate…” I’d love to know how this was received in suburban cinemas around the USA (in Georgia they banned the theatrical version). Hammerstein, the lyricist, was a passionate anti-fascist and supported liberal causes his whole life but there’s something of the PSA about this movie. As if the American audience is being asked - for the sake of the post-war industrial miracle - to recognise their fellow citizens and to build a cohesive workforce double-quick. Those Chevys and B-52s aren’t going to build themselves.

It’s Apocalypse Now. I mean it’s not Apocalypse Now, obviously, but from the very first scene we’re in a familiar location. There’s an undisciplined up-country commissary vibe here. The sailors (Seabees) on the island are bored and under-supervised, remote from the actual fighting - further North in the Pacific Theatre - on what looks like long-term R&R. They’re served by a wheeler-dealer quartermaster figure (Ray Walston as Luther Billis) who is essentially a singing Milo Minderbinder. They’re down on the beach with their shirts off, making human pyramids and trading with the enterprising locals - Juanita Hall’s ‘Bloody Mary’ in particular. We learn the war has made her a lot of money - selling knickknacks, grass skirts - and quite possibly more than that - to the Yanks: she soon essentially procures her own daughter for a young lieutenant new to the island and we get a sense of her business model. Somehow, though, this unconscionable betrayal is presented as an act of love. The lieutenant falls immediately (and I mean immediately) for the young Tongan (France Nuyen as Liat) and the self-torment about her ethnicity begins.

There’s a French planter. What we understand is that this middle-aged runaway (Rossano Brazzi as Emile de Becque) killed someone (for noble reasons, it becomes clear) back in France and now lives in exile (and in great luxury) in Tonga. We’re suspicious, of course. And here’s another Apocalypse Now parallel - with those tragic French colonists left behind on their ghostly, up-river plantation (restored in Coppola’s Redux edit). The history of colonial involvement in the Pacific is, as you’d expect, apalling. These islands, remote from European scrutiny, became a kind of laboratory for labour practices and abuses later adopted elsewhere. Tens of thousands of Polynesians were kidnapped and taken to work on plantations in distant places, long after the formal abolition of slavery. There’s a community of Tongans living in Peru to this day who got there via this route. How did Emile, our planter, make his money? Secure his happy life on the island? No one’s asking.

I think this is the sexy filter

It’s psychedelic. One of the movie’s innovations was to put up a colour filter each time things get intense or emotional. There’s some kind of colour-coding: red for love? Orange for danger? Purple for sexy stuff? Not sure. The colours are so intense they’re nauseating, disconcerting, doomy. They come and go peremptorily. And they must have been pretty in-your-face in the cinema: the Todd-AO widescreen process required a huge, wrap-around screen. The director, Joshua Logan, who was really a theatre director and writer, acknowledged later that the colours were a mistake. He wrote in his memoir that he wished he could stand outside theaters playing the movie, wearing a sign that said, "I DIRECTED IT, AND I DON'T LIKE THE COLOR EITHER!"

It’s a musical. Did I tell you it’s a musical? And the subject matter - war, prejudice and so on - gives it the mild awkwardness of a La La Land (why are they singing? What’s wrong with them?). And this explains why you’ve never heard of anyone in the cast - they’re mostly theatrical stars. Hardly any of them can sing, though. Only two cast members perform their own numbers (Mitzi Gaynor and Ray Walston). Even the actual singers (like Juanita Hall) are over-dubbed by professionals. We forget that the musical is a modern form, younger than cinema itself, even in the theatre. In the 1920s both Rodgers and Hammerstein were still writing operettas and musical reviews. Their first genuine musical didn’t come until the 1940s. Their first cinema hit in the 1950s. Everything here is still new. The form is still evolving. Anomalies abound.

Pecs in Polynesia

There is flesh. And a lot of it. The American cast is semi-clad throughout. A corn-fed regiment of young men and women that’s really a little too physical - I’d say ‘lubricious’ only I don’t want to sound like your granddad. And there’s a kind of bathhouse intimacy about some of these scenes with the sailors. These guys obviously get on very well. Only in very formal, military situations does anyone put a shirt on. Muscles ripple, navy nurses seem to wear mainly swimwear. I guess they’re at the beach, but really? Military discipline seems to have broken down all together here. I suspect this relaxed physicality is carried over from Broadway - it’s the fellowship of the chorus. In Hollywood in the 1950s things were usually substantially more up-tight.

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• South Pacific is on Amazon Prime. There’s a Blu-Ray.

• All of these reviews (plus others, more drive-by in nature) are on Letterboxd.

• Various efforts have been made to restore the 70mm South Pacific print, including adding deleted scenes back in and trying to dial down the colour filters (although apparently that bit wasn’t a success).

• I’m convinced the coloured filters suggest cold war dread. Nuclear Winter, fall-out clouds. Stanley Kramer’s post-apocalyptic On the Beach - released a year after South Pacific - comes to mind (and not for the first time here). A lethal cloud drifts across the Pacific…

• Tonga, the story’s location, was just South of the furthest extent of the Japanese occupation of the Pacific and became a major interchange for the allied military supply chain during WW2.

• The first proper Hollywood musical I wrote about here was The Broadway Melody, from 1929 - also the first musical to win an Oscar. And there was 1927’s The Jazz Singer, a maudlin nonsense but also ostensibly a musical.

• I learnt a bit about the political-economy of colonial Polynesia when I wrote about 1935 blockbuster Mutiny on the Bounty, in which a British ship, sent to Tahiti in Polynesia to harvest breadfruit as a food crop for plantation slaves in the Carribean, is, er, diverted from its mission.

• The practice of abducting and enslaving people from Polynesian islands - usually taken to work in Australia or the Americas - was called Blackbirding (we’d call it human trafficking) and continued well into the 20th Century.