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Slipping in unabashed commercial plugs for the Matson Navigation Co. and a Honolulu restaurant named Don the Beachcomber's, Narrator Orson Welles oozes into the tale of a girl from Akron who suffers from "the total lack of coconut palms in her home town." She heads out for Hawaii, meets another girl on shipboard and eventually, in Hawaii, the other girl's brother. Intones Commentator Welles: "Perhaps her heart would beat even faster if she knew what Ted was thinking." Ted is thinking that he wants to show her the islands, and together they fly over the volcanic craters of Kilauea and Haleakala, dance away the nights and, in a curious reversal of roles, lie patiently on the sand while a dog goes surfboarding.
Abruptly, with no effort at transition, Adventure switches focus to a young French painter who yearns for the Gauguintuan lushness of Tahiti. From then on, it is Tonga, Fiji, the New Hebrides, New Zealand, Australia, with never a suggestion of a connective narrative. Sometimes the sound track loses touch with the movie, as when the narrator oohs about Tonga's 6-ft. 3-in. Queen Salote, who never appears. But the real pity is that the Cinerama producers, who proclaimed in 1952 that Cinerama can do anything the regular movies can, and do it better, have never been willing—or able—to tackle anything more active or dramatic than a mountaintop.