Tales of the Unfulfilled: South Pacific

If I tell my husband that he's insufficiently romantic, he'll ask me what "romantic" means. When you have no disposable income, romance looks like making supper, having coffee ready if you wake up before I do, and borrowing strange musicals for my viewing pleasure. And the original 1958 film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific certainly qualifies as "strange".

Set in the Pacific theater of WWII and climaxing with an unspecified campaign that is essentially the Battle of Guadalcanal, South Pacific was written as a Broadway show in 1949 and based on two stories from James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, a semi-autobiographical account of his wartime service. The show revolves around the relations between naive Midwestern nurse Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor), the confident, handsome, and mysterious French plantation owner Emile De Becque (Rossano Brazzi), Marine lieutenant Joe Cable (John Kerr), one very bored construction battalion led in spirit by entrepreneurial womanizer Luther Billis (Ray Walston, a.k.a. My Favourite Martian), and the local Tonkinese (Vietnamese) matriarch, Bloody Mary (Juanita Hall) and her daughter, Liat (France Nguyen). Lt. Cable has been sent by his captain to engage in some critical recon of the Japanese-occupied Marie-Louise island with the help of a locally stationed naval group, and it is through his eyes that we are introduced to the strange and magnificent world of the Solomon Islands. His mission may have an ace in the hole courtesy of local planter De Becque, who once lived and hunted on Marie-Louise, and who is utterly starry-eyed for Nellie, who Cable and the Navy ask to gather intelligence on De Becque before they make him an offer. This isn't such a bad request for Nellie, because she in return thinks Emile is the cat's pyjamas. Underlying this serious stuff is Luther, a character added by Michener at the request of Rodgers and Hammerstein to lighten things up. The only thing more antsy and bored than a GI sitting around waiting for action is a combat engineer with nothing to engineer, and Luther blows off steam by making grass skirts to sell as souvenirs, bartering (and bantering) with Bloody Mary, doing favours for the lovely Nellie, and trying to find an officer who will sign out a boat to Bali Hai - with Luther at the tiller. Bali Hai, an island in site of the naval base and off-limits to enlisted men and non-coms because that's where all the plantation women (and native women) have been evacuated to, is also legendary to the sailors for being the site of the local Boar's Tooth ceremony, a sort of hunting festival that involves booze, dancing, and, well, festivities - everything a bored engineer or sailor could want. He eventually convinces johnny-come-lately Cable to head on over, and in the course of the visit, Cable learns three things: a) Bloody Mary has a daughter, Liat, b) Liat is gorgeous, and c) Bloody Mary has it in her head that Cable will make Liat a good husband. With loneliness and loveliness both firmly at play, Cable falls head-over-heels for Liat, and they spend the next several weeks visiting and enjoying each other's company, until Bloody Mary gives Cable an ultimatum to marry Liat, and Cable makes a run for it - whether this is commitment-phobia, fear of not returning to the States, or racial nervousness is not specific in the context of the film, so read it however you like. All this came out on film three or four years before Kirk and Uhura gave us television's first interracial kiss.

Concurrently, Nellie has accepted a marriage proposal from Emile after a two-week whirlwind romance, and has learned that he fled France because he committed manslaughter - which she's okay with, he had a good reason, he's a good man, it was long ago, etc. What she's not okay with? Earlier in the film, in what must have caused a rash of double-takes across America, a pair of Tonkinese children run up and call Emile (who's not with Nellie at the time) 'papa'. After Nellie's accepted his proposal, he digs up the courage to tell her about the kids, and his dead native wife. Nellie freaks out and bolts, rebuffing all subsequent attempts by Emile to contact her. When Cable learns of Emile's broken heart, he does what any soldier good at their job does and gets the edge he needs by taking advantage of Emile at his most vulnerable, after he's been rejected by Nellie a second time, and the two of them start formulating their plan for insertion on to Marie-Louise.

This most recent viewing of South Pacific was my first time seeing it as an adult - the last time was a stage performance in 1998 - and even as a child, I felt it was brimming with unfulfilled potential in terms of the rushed feel to its racial storylines. It was just last year that I learned it was based on a Michener book, which I've been trying to get my hands on ever since. As I've said many times in this space, old-time writers and filmmakers weren't as a whole afraid of social taboos, and South Pacific is no exception. Can you imagine the audience reaction when Cable sings, regarding racism, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" ('you've got to be taught, before it's too late/before you are six or seven or eight/to hate all the people your relatives hate/you've got to be carefully taught!)? The whole show, from its Broadway beginnings, was subject to criticism, controversy, and accusations of Communism. It's also notable for, even on Broadway, using actors of appropriate nationality to play the roles of Bloody Mary and Liat. In the film, there are subtle touches like black and Native American faces amongst the construction battalion. What stands out most to me is the subtle-yet-not contrast of Nellie's reaction to Emile's crime versus the matter of Emile's children. In other words, she's completely okay with and able to brush off manslaughter, but can't compute the idea of Emile loving someone who isn't white. Shocking not in terms of politics but of story, especially in a genre known (and often derided) for it's gaity and light-heartedness, is a main character's unceremonious death off-screen.

As a musical, South Pacific is unquestionably one of the finest. With globally recognisable tunes like "Bloody Mary", "There Is Nothing Like A Dame", "Some Enchanted Evening", "Honey Bun", and "Younger than Springtime", it firmly cemented its place in history. Why I say its a strange one is because of the distinct lack of song and dance numbers. With the notable exceptions of the mind-blowing Boar's Tooth ceremony, and the hilarious cross-dressing "Honey Bun" sequence, all songs are sung in, well, very natural manners, the way a bunch of soldiers would sit around making a tune, or two people sitting together - they stay sitting together while they sing. A particularly happy character may break out into a spontaneous and very normal little jig, like in "I'm in Love With a Wonderful Guy", but that's it. It's especially unusual for a Rodgers and Hammerstein show. Even though South Pacific is one of their earlier film projects, preceeded only by State Fair and Oklahoma!, those two are still characterized by lavish dancing. (The next R&H film after South Pacific? The King and I.) It's also kind of wierd in a filmmaking sense. A heavy use of colour filters, a new technology at the time, was originally decided on by director Joshua Logan because he feared the richness of the on-location filming wouldn't translate sufficiently to the film stock of the time, which tended to flatten colours. 20th Century Fox then upped the filters even further before the film's release. Logan later regretted the decision, as the end result is a lot of scenes visually spoiled by mustard yellow or emerald green tinting, the kind of stuff film restorers can do nothing about. Speaking of film restorers, South Pacific is also unusual for being one of the few films that originally screened as what we'd call a "director's cut". Known as the "Roadshow Edition" and clocking in at nearly three hours, it was cut down to 2.5 before going into general release, and that was the South Pacific film audiences knew until an original cut was discovered in a private collection in the late 70's. It's been restored now as best as possible; unfortunately, there's only so much damage even the finest restorers can fix. Still, it's always great to have a film as it was intended to be seen. I have to admit, in spite of all this, the thing that I find oddest about the film is the casting of John Kerr at Lt. Cable. Sure, he was an established character actor by that time, but as a romantic lead, I just found him wierd. For one thing, he wasn't good-looking in the classical sense that you generally see in films from that era - he was a skinny, almost gawky guy, a bit weaselly, with small eyes and a large-ish mouth, kind of like a combination of a thinner version of the main character on Prison Break and the original Ferret-Face, Frank Burns on M*A*S*H. And he wasn't some exceptional singer, either - his songs are the most obviously dubbed as nasal almost-alto Cable breaks into a big low-tenor, to an effect more shocking than dreamy. Not a singer, not a classical hearththrob, and it was a role a dozen other actors of the time could have filled. I wonder if, perhaps, he was the only one courted who would love a Vietnamese woman on-screen.

A great musical, a historical document of cultural importance, and another weapon in the arsenal against the prevailing ignorance of an "innocent age" of film, South Pacific is a film that should not go unseen. Go ahead, rent the two-disc version so you can watch the complete film - it's worth it.