I did a significant amount of my courting to this film.It was on for so long at the "Astoria",Brighton that I must have taken at least 5 different girls to see it during its run.It may even have moved to another cinema in the town later,my memory is a bit hazy about that,but by the time it was taken off at the "Astoria" I had become a little more sophisticated and was going up to West End shows (15 shillings on "The Brighton Belle"),but I knew all the words to "There is nothing like a dame". Based on James Michener's "Tales from the South Pacific "it has some of Rodgers and Hammerstein's finest songs blended into a stirring tale of love,prejudice,redemption and heroism in wartime.Everything a 1958 audience could wish for,simple people that we were. The world is now a much smaller (and scarier)place,and what to us was exotic is now the everyday.We have lost our sense of wonder,become blase,what once evoked a gasp now merely evokes a yawn. To make any meaningful criticism of "South Pacific" we must regain our lost innocence. In 1958 American Culture was universally coveted.The American Way was the way everybody wanted to go.The idea that U.S. military personnel were ordinary decent human beings(now considered laughably naive) was widespread. Lt Cable,then a legitimate target for a mother with a beautiful daughter would now be a legitimate target for a suicide bomber. Of course the movie seems trite and laboured,disingenuous and clichéd in 2006 if viewed with nearly half a century of hindsight,but,please believe me,it wasn't always so. Rossano Brazzi was impossibly handsome and sophisticated,Ray Walston your wisecracking All-American noncom (homoerotic subtext?you're having a laugh,surely?).OK so John Kerr was a bit of a milquetoast but he was from Princeton N.J.And France Nguyen.......surely no child was ever more beautiful. I was a bit puzzled as to why Juanita Hall was dubbed because I had an L.P. at home titled "Juanita Hall sings Bessie Smith" and she sounded pretty good to me.But that was showbiz;they'd dubbed Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge in "Carmen Jones" hadn't they? And Mitzi Gaynor,surely one of the most underrated song and dance women in movies."I'm as corny as Kansas in August......"brilliant. If I'm ever on one of those endless white beaches looking out to sea and shielding my eyes against the sun,I shall fully expect Nellie Forbush and her fellow nurses to come running through the surf towards me and then I'll know I've died and gone to heaven.
Review of South Pacific
