Hacker Cinema
South Pacific
1958 · Film · 157 min
Directed by Joshua Logan
Can a girl from Little Rock find happiness with a mature French planter she got to know one enchanted evening away from the military hospital where she is a nurse? Or should she just wash that man out of her hair? Bloody Mary is the philosopher of the island and it's hard to believe she could be the mother of Liat who has captured the heart of Lt. Joseph Cable USMC. While waiting for action in the war in the South Pacific, sailors and nurses put on a musical comedy show. The war gets closer and the saga of Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque becomes serious drama.
1 positive3 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Film (and television) seems studiously underrepresented given the presence of authors, playwrights, poets, and musicians. Musicals are also absent.
I'd also suggest that cultural impact plays a strong part in Homer's prominence. The American Homer would probably be older rather than more recent (at least by present reckoning).
Francis Ford Coppola / Mario Puzo, The Godfather; Michael Curtiz, Casablanca; Steven Speilberg; Orson Welles, Citizen Kane; Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, etc., might make my list.
I watch a lot of old movies (30s-40s-50s). A ton of them have a 40s-50s man marrying a 20s woman.
No idea if that was societal norm, mens fantasy, or whatever. I have to kind of believe movie execs would want the largest audience and so if 40s-50s men dating 20s women was not appealing to women of the time they'd been losing 1/2 the market. But, maybe these particular movies were the male equivalent of romance novels which seem to be written 99% for a female audience
Some examples:
The Girl Can't Help It (1956)
South Pacific (1958)
My Fair Lady (1964)
The Far Country (1954)
Casablanca (1942)
To Have and Have Not (1944)
There are literally 100s of them and I'm not recommending any of the movies above per-say, but it does stick out to me just how common that theme is of man, at least 15yrs older than woman which I believe is less common today
As the kids say these days: you accidentally said the quiet part out loud :)
When it was Margaret Sanger being prosecuted for distributing information about contraception, well, there's a perfectly reasonable justification for that law! Women can't just go around having sex without consequences! When it was theaters refusing to book touring companies of South Pacific, well, it's Communist to say that interracial marriage is OK! And we're at war with Communism! When it was movie studio associations and comic book publisher associations enforcing "codes" to avoid having formal censorship imposed on them by law, well, topics like sex and drugs are objectionable, and people shouldn't be encouraged to question authority figures!
The people complaining today about being "silenced" tend to hold the same types of views as their predecessors who used to do the silencing. And their predecessors didn't stop at just boycotting or otherwise exercising their right of free association (and disassociation). Even if it's not, in the end, held to be fair play, turnabout is a nice source of schadenfreude.
Well, the story is a combination of typical archetypes retold with pretty pictures. That much I cannot argue about. And I think that what you are really saying by "the plot sucked" is "it's too archetype driven". I'm basing this on:
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious
Sure the characters ranged from a bit 2-d (the Col.) to well fleshed out (Neytiri (watch it again if you don't believe me)) and the acting ranged from "will probably win an award it was so good" Saldana to "thanks for showing up and picking up your paycheck" Weaver. But that's nothing different than you'll find in almost every movie -- the principles are fleshed out and the supporting cast is flat.
Why can't we have more 'smart' movies like Erin Brockovich/Schindler's List/Fight Club/District 9/Oldboy/etc. (archetypes of David vs. Goliath, Greed and Bullies) or The Incredibly True Story of Two Teenagers In Love/Léon/American Beauty/Mississippi Masala/South Pacific/Moulin Rouge/West Side Story etc. (Forbidden Love) or Lawrence of Arabia/Dune/Hunt for Red October/etc. (Lovable Turncoat)... you ask? And I'd counter that all of those are as archetype driven as any other well known flick (archetype stories provided in parens).
You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes. How many times has Romeo and Juliet been retold almost verbatim? And by and large the audience enjoys these things and says "oh the plot was so good" when really, they are just a rehash of old story ideas. We even group movies into archetype driven categories "love story", "ghost story", "suspense", etc.
So yes, I was being "cute" with my notional art-house flick. But if you want to find something not driven by archetypes, where the artists consciously try to avoid those things, you have to go there, or to France or Italy perhaps. Here, http://www.imdb.com/chart/top this is the top 250 movies on IMDB not by dollars but by rating. How many of these are "smart" movies meaning "not a rehash of archetypes"? Very few if any.
It's pretty simple really, if you don't want your intelligence to be insulted (meaning you don't want an archetype driven story), you end up with a movie about a vapid cowgirl/model with giant thumbs or a movie director that can't focus on making movies because he's too busy with all his mistresses (which is actually just a retelling of the "guy with too many girlfriends archetype"). And given that non-archetype driven movies are typically poorly rated and attended by the open public, either you are particularly "smart" or those movies tend to suck.