Joshua Logan (1958)

The coloration is unmistakeably 1950s but looks very odd today. In evening scenes, the figures in the foreground are virtually monochrome and the backgrounds slightly tinted.  In many daylight sequences, the blues have almost disappeared so that the sky and ocean shots bring to mind not Polynesia but postcards of English seaside resorts, where the colour has decayed from months or years in racks outside holiday souvenir shops.  (According to Wikipedia, the use of coloured filters for the musical numbers caused some controversy at the time of the film’s original release.)   Another remarkable thing about the screen version of South Pacific is how few of the principals did their own singing – remarkable because you’d have thought they could only have been cast because of the quality of their voice.   This is true of the pleasant, unremarkable John Kerr, who plays Lt Joe Cable (and whose singing is dubbed by Bill Lee).  It’s especially and bizarrely true of Juanita Hall, as Bloody Mary (sung by Muriel Smith), because Hall had played and sung the role on Broadway (and won a Tony):  it shows in her gruesome stagy playing in front of the camera.   Rossano Brazzi, as Emile de Becque (sung by Giorgio Tozzi), is a rather different case.  Brazzi was a big name at the time and got the part (I assume) on the back of other recent films like The Barefoot Contessa, Three Coins in the Fountain and Summertime, although his acting here is still pretty wooden.  I was relieved to learn (again from Wikipedia) that Mitzi Gaynor did her own singing.  Watching her in the lead role of Ensign Nellie Forbush makes me so physically uncomfortable that it would be terrible if there were no good vocal reason for Gaynor’s being in the picture.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein song list is legendary and formidable:  ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’, ‘Bali Ha’i’, ‘Cock-eyed Optimist’, ‘I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy’.  There are also some embarrassing (or at least they’re embarrassingly staged in the film) items – ‘Dites-Moi’, ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair’, ‘Honeybun’, ‘Happy Talk’.  The romantic numbers – ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, ‘Younger Than Springtime’, ‘This Nearly Was Mine’ – have a kind of yearning uplift which is hard to resist emotionally.   Some of the songs in South Pacific are, I think, among the first I remember hearing on the radio as a very young child.  I’ve never seen a professional stage production, though, and  I’d never watched the film all the way through until we saw it at BFI in March 2007, when I remember Sally predicting a predominantly gay audience.  You can see from the amount of male flesh on display in South Pacific what a treat this U-certificate film would have been for homosexual men in the 1950s but in fact there seemed to be many more middle-aged-to-elderly women – whom I’d always thought of as the core South Pacific audience (although obviously middle-aged women of a different generation!) – than there were men in NFT1 that day.   There’s very little in the score that’s less than famous – maybe only ‘My Girl Back Home’ and ‘You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught’.  The latter is an awkward reflection by Joe Cable on the racial prejudices which have obstructed his love for the Polynesian girl Liat – just as they’ve got in the way of Nellie’s passion for the widower Emile, who has two mixed-race children from his marriage to a local woman.   It may be this aspect of the material, in combination with the World War II setting, that gained the stage show of South Pacific admiration as a ‘serious’ musical (it won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as its multiple Tonys) – but the racial theme is surely an example of what Dr Johnson said about women preachers and dogs walking on their hind legs.  The war bits aren’t that hot either.

The film’s latest appearance on television is as part of the BBC’s ‘Great American Songbook’ season – Oklahoma! was on the night before.   We watched the second half of South Pacific and caught just the last fifteen minutes of Oklahoma! but that was more than enough to remind me why I much prefer the latter.  It’s not just the superior performances and direction; it’s the fact that Oklahoma!, except for the Judd Fry part of the story, is thematically and emotionally circumscribed in a way that gives it a reassuring moral consistency.  (Rod Steiger is so powerfully pathological as Judd that he threatens to throw the scheme out of joint but his appearances are sufficiently rationed for this not to be a problem until near the very end.)   In comparison, the larger moral scope of South Pacific (based on James Michener’s 1948 novel Tales of the South Pacific, which also won a Pulitzer Prize) is a mess.  It also lacks the complexity and credibility it needs to be an interesting mess.  The opportunity of putting the material on screen brings in other ingredients like the exotic travelogue element.  Joshua Logan co-wrote the book for the stage musical with Oscar Hammerstein and the pair of them and Michener shared the screenplay credit for the film (with Paul Osborn) yet neither the script nor Logan’s direction gets much out of the contrast between the paradisal locations and the world at war context.  No connection seems to be made between the racial issues and the ‘colourful’ displays of tribal custom.

Mitzi Gaynor is a cross between Doris Day and Julie Andrews – she seems to exist in a no man’s land between Day’s suppressed sex appeal and Andrews’s hygienic boyishness.  Gaynor has a small, unremarkable, not very pretty face; she’s a decent singer and a wearingly competent actress and dancer.  Although I assume that Nellie from Little Rock, Arkansas is meant to have a naturally sassy, forthright mid-West charm, everything about Gaynor is worked up and synthetic.  She has an androgynous quality:  in the excruciating performance of ‘Honeybun’, you forget that Nellie, in a sailor suit, is meant to be in drag – at least until Luther Billis arrives in his grass skirt and coconut shell brassiere.  It’s hard to tell how old Mitzi Gaynor is – which is probably just as well to make her a credible partner for Rossano Brazzi’s Emile de Becque.   When he tells Nellie about his children, Emile says, by way of explanation of his mixed marriage, that he came to the South Pacific as a ‘very young man’, yet the elder child can’t be more than eight or nine, and Brazzi looks about fifty.  (He was actually forty-two at the time and Gaynor was twenty-seven.)    Liat is played by the lovely, blank France Nuyen.  The senior ranks of the US Navy are overplayed by all concerned.   It’s little surprise that, among the enormous cast, hardly anyone except for Brazzi and Ray Walston (who gives a respectable performance as Luther, against the odds) was heard of again – although I noticed that Doug McClure (Trampas in The Virginian etc) plays one of the hospitalised pilots.  John Kerr’s entry on Wikipedia tells us that he went on to be a very successful lawyer.  Someone called Joan Fontaine appears in the credits, as a member of the corps of Polynesian woman.  The real Joan Fontaine appears to have an alibi as she was making A Certain Smile for Jean Negulesco at the time.  On the other hand, her co-star in that picture was Rossano Brazzi …

4 April 2010