South Pacific (Magna Releasing Corp. and 20th Century-Fox), as a Broadway musical, had so much vim and vinegar that it would be almost impossible to make a bad movie out of it—but the moviemakers appear to have tried.
They gave it everything they had, and a lot they did not. They gave it, for a budget, almost $6,000,000, and for a setting the most beautiful Hawaiian island —Kauai, about 100 miles west-northwest of Honolulu. They gave it a topflight director (Joshua Logan) and a glittering cast. They gave it, on the theory that there can never be too much of a good thing, every last alarum and excursion of the play's somewhat too ployful plot, and then proceeded to lard it out with new business, a new song, even a whole new battle sequence, until the final version runs to the seat-flattening length of 2 hr. 51 min.—plus a 15-minute intermission. They gave it the supercolossal screen of the Todd-AO process and twirled the volume knob on the stereophonic sound system until the chandeliers began to rattle. They gave it some of the smoothest Technicolor that has ever creamed a moviegoer's eyeballs; but then, gripped by the fear that all this would be too subtle, they decided to smear "mood" all over the big scenes by shooting them through filters. Result: too often the actors are tinted egg yellow, turtle green-and sometimes phosphorescent fuchsia.
In short, South Pacific is about as tastelessly impressive as a ten-ton marshmallow. Nevertheless, it will probably run almost as long as it did on Broadway (1,925 performances), and it seems sure to make yet another bale of kale for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. If it does, most of the credit will belong to the memorable score by Rodgers and to the shrewdly sentimental Broadway book by Hammerstein and Logan.
The book, which makes use of characters and situations in James Michener's bestselling Tales of the South Pacific, tells what happens during the early days of the war in the Pacific to some naval officers, men and nurses on a U.S-held island in the New Hebrides. Nurse Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor) falls in love Some Enchanted Evening with a middle-aged French planter (Rossano Brazzi). Marine Lieut. Joseph Cable (John Kerr) meanwhile engages in some Happy Talk with a native girl named Liat (France Nuyen), who dances around looking Younger Than Springtime on an island called Bali Ha'i. And the sailors, inspired by a Seabee named Luther Billis (Ray Walston), mill around on the beach, shouting that There Is Nothing Like a Dame. But the picture spends most of its time with the nurse, who tells herself that I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair, but then decides that I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy.
The main parts are reasonably well played and sung. Actress Gaynor, who has a pleasant voice and a pretty figure, may very well satisfy the customers who did not see Mary Martin play the part. Actor Brazzi, whose songs are superbly dubbed by the Metropolitan Opera's Basso Giorgio Tozzi, is suitably virile as her aging lover.