OVP: South Pacific (1958)

Film: South Pacific (1958)
Stars: Rosanno Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston, Juanita Hall
Director: Joshua Logan
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Sound*, Scoring, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Mitzi Gaynor-click here to learn more about Ms. Gaynor (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I am frequently asked (oftentimes by myself while standing in front of a mirror) "what is the most high-profile classic American film that you've never seen?"  This year, thanks to "Saturdays with the Stars," I have officially removed two of my most common answers: Strangers on a Train, which we covered in our month devoted to Ruth Roman, and for our final episode of this season, South Pacific (I genuinely don't know what my answer to this question is now, as I saw Dracula last year and I'm running out of obvious classics that I'm missing...maybe something more modern like Die Hard?).  It's hard to underscore what a big deal South Pacific was in its era.  It was the top-grossing movie of 1958 (nearly double the next biggest competitor, Auntie Mame), and had run on Broadway for years before finally making it to the big-screen.  It's also impossible to underscore how much this meant for Mitzi Gaynor's career.  While she had been headlining films for nearly a decade by the time South Pacific came out, this was undoubtedly her "big break," the movie that might catapult her from leading woman to "star of the decade" sort of status.  Alas, for Gaynor, this was to be the peak, not the start of a new plateau, for her career though at least she has one immortal film on her resumé (more than most can claim).

(Spoilers Ahead) For those unfamiliar (I had seen a stage production of the movie), South Pacific centers on a military base in World War II near Tonga, and is based on the novel Tale of the South Pacific by James Michener.  The film is more of an ensemble than you'd expect from a musical, particularly a Rodgers & Hammerstein production (where side characters are there to bemuse, not to steal focus), but the main lovers are Nellie Forbush (Gaynor), a young nurse stationed there from Arkansas , and Emile (Brazzi), a Frenchman who owns a plantation in the region and once killed a man.  The film, unusually for a romance, starts in the middle of their affair, with them already in love (for a nearly three-hour movie it's weirdly plot-heavy, so this is for the best), describing how they met through "Some Enchanted Evening."  While they are falling in love, and deciding if they should spend their lives together on this remote island so far from Nellie's home, we also meet Lieutenant Joe Cable (Kerr), whom the enigmatic Bloody Mary (Hall) has designs on, and lures him, along with a randy, bumbling soldier Luther Bills (Walston) in hopes of Joe marrying her beautiful daughter, a young Polynesian woman named Liat (France Nuyen).  Racism rears its ugly head in the back half of the film as Joe refuses to marry Liat despite being in love with her, and Nellie does the same to Emile when she realizes that he has mixed-race children from a previous relationship with a Polynesian girl.  Emile then volunteers for a risky mission with Joe & Luther, during which Joe is killed, and eventually escapes, just in time for Nellie to have realized the err of her bigotry, and decide to live with Emile and help him raise his children.

Like I said, a lot of plot.  South Pacific is generally considered at once one of the best scores in the Rodgers & Hammerstein collective, and one of the most politically-charged books in their canon...and generally considered to be the most polarizing of all of their screen adaptations (though for my money Carousel is the weakest of the bunch).  The film is shocking in how progressive it is about race, particularly for a film that starts out with Juanita Hall, a biracial woman who is half-black but not Asian, in yellowface in the opening number.  The movie's best aspect to its plot is having blonde-haired Nellie, the sort of heroine we expect from these movies (pretty, strong-but-feminine, and of course white), try to explain her bigotry about her husband having had a mixed race relationship, but failing to do so.  Almost any other script of this era would have had Nellie be understanding from the start or had her be a bit crueler to have us expect this from her, but that's not how South Pacific rolls.  Instead, Nellie is shown to be the ugly one when she has to break up with Emile, though she comes to her senses later, the same as Joe is for denying his love for Liat.  In a number called "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" (which southern legislatures tried to get banned from touring productions of the musical in the 1950's), Joe sings about how racism isn't something you're born with, but instead you learn to hate people because of whom your family hates.  It's a powerful number, and a powerful message inside a film that normally wouldn't have such a meaning.

That said, South Pacific is not my favorite Rodgers & Hammerstein movie.  While it feels less jarring now than it did in 1958 thanks to the likes of Steven Soderbergh & Clint Eastwood, the color lenses during the musical numbers add little to the film other than to wash out the stars.  It sounds like director Joshua Logan was hoping to soften the tropical scenes to make them seem more believable (despite filming in the Pacific), but it comes across as hokey.  In the context of the film, it feels like the movie is boxing in the most memorable moments rather than letting them wash over the audience.  The film also struggles in going from stage-to-screen.  For starters, the lip-syncing is jarring (particularly John Kerr's voice is absurd), as the powerful voices don't match the actors (only Gaynor & Walston of the main singers in the film are doing their own vocal work).  Additionally, the dance numbers aren't impressive at all.  The opening scene, where all of the sailors are half-dressed (literally one man has the name "Stewpot" written across his white crop top shirt), looks like a gay porn.  I'm not knocking this motif (for realz), but it's the biggest dance number in the whole movie & they barely move.  Having someone like Gaynor, who could hoof better than pretty much any woman in pictures at the time, starring in an epic musical and not having her do a major number is absurd.

The casting is also a bit questionable.  Brazzi is handsome and debonair, but he does not have chemistry with Gaynor.  Gaynor is probably the right choice for this film (I've heard criticisms of her being miscast), but I wish the film had grounded her casual racism a bit more before the big climactic scene (another case of not adapting the picture to the big-screen).  Gaynor, as we saw a couple of weeks ago with The Joker is Wild, was capable of big dramatic work, but it's hard to elevate a character like Nellie without a bit more nuance, and the script isn't giving us that & Gaynor isn't able to do this in her numbers, which are the fluffiest of the movie.  John Kerr is sexy AF as Joe (seriously-I audibly catcalled at the screen at one point), but he suffers a similar fate-probably the right casting, but the staging & transition to film doesn't work for this character.  Juanita Hall's work is so over-the-top that I don't really know how to judge her performance, only to say that the "Bali Ha'i" number is far more alluring on stage than it is here, but still impressive (it might be one of those numbers that's impossible to ruin).

The film won three Academy Award nominations in 1958.  It's surely a result of the film's polarizing effect that it didn't compete for Best Picture despite it being the highest-grossing film of the year; generally a film that looks and acts like South Pacific would have competed in the Best Picture & Actress categories based solely on that box office.  The Cinematography nomination is the one I'll quarrel with the most-the South Pacific looks great (even though it sure looks like they're filming in Hawaii, rather than Tonga), but the color filters are off-putting and add little to the picture, so I wouldn't have included this as a nomination.  The sound makes sense (everyone sounds great, particularly Giorgio Tozzi in "Some Enchanted Evening,"), but the casting department hurts this argument by having Brazzi & Kerr lip-syncing voices that they simply cannot mirror in their spoken performances.  The most-earned nomination is Scoring, which the film lost to Gigi (a picture that dominated the Oscars, though like South Pacific it didn't get its leading lady into contention), but as I stated above-the stage-to-screen translation doesn't work.  All-in-all, South Pacific has some truly glorious moments, but it's more a fascinating failure than it is an epic masterwork, or a celebrated classic like The Sound of Music.  I'm going with 3-stars as I liked it, but not higher as I understand its flaws.

The movie didn't score Mitzi Gaynor an Oscar nomination, instead only giving her a Golden Globe citation.  One wonders if an Oscar citation might have enticed her to stay in Hollywood a few years longer.  She only made three more movies after South Pacific, with her final farewell to Hollywood coming in 1963's For Love or Money with Kirk Douglas.  Gaynor would instead migrate to Vegas, becoming a genuine star in the nightclub circuit for years, achieving levels of fame there that she never captured on the screen.  Career highlights would include getting top-billing over The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and receiving the longest standing ovation in Oscar history for her bubbly performance of "Georgy Girl" at the 1966 Oscars.  Decades later, she's still entertaining, and even has an active Twitter account where she shares memories of Hollywood's Golden Age.  We'll start our second season of "Saturdays with the Stars" on January 1st, but not before I give you one last little treat from this season on Monday.