South Pacific - a family reprise

While rooting through some old family documents, I found an undated newspaper clipping with a picture of my mother in the eponymous role of Loughborough Amateur Operatic Society’s 1939 production of Katinka. No, I hadn’t heard of Katinka either, but…

Katinka: first production 1915; music by Rudolf Friml: book & lyrics by Otto Harbach. The plot: out of a sense of duty Katinka has married Boris Strogoff, the Russian ambassador to Austria. Her real love is Ivan Dimitri, an attaché. Ivan's American friend, Thaddeus Hopper helps Katinka escape and hides her in his house. When Mrs Hopper becomes suspicious and angry, Hopper pays Arif Bey to conceal Katinka in his harem. By error, Mrs Hopper is placed in the harem. At a Viennese café the principals are all gathered. When a lady named Olga announces she is Boris' lawful wife, a happy ending follows, apparently...

And if you think that story sounds hard to take, consider the 1958 movie version of South Pacific: the Solomon Islands in 1943, a French planter, Emile de Becque (played by an Italian), has the hots (Some Enchanted Evening) for a rather naive ("I could say life is just a bowl of Jello") US Navy nurse from Little Rock called Nellie Forbush (played by Mitzi Gaynor, who changed her name from Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber). Nellie falls for the Gallic charms of this “Wonderful Guy”, but gives him the cold shoulder when she discovers he has two children whose skin colour is clearly not French ("I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair". However, the USMC wants her to persuade de Becque to work as a scout on a nearby island occupied by the Japanese (sounds like a holiday, eh?). He is to be accompanied by the ‘dashing’ Lt Joseph Cable, who has fallen for a (“Younger Than Springtime”) Polynesian (played by a Vietnamese), but is worried by her ‘strange shaped eyes”!!!. Cable also has a number of secret admirers in the beach laundry. Liat’s “mother” is the barrel-shaped Polynesian (born in New Jersey) Mama-san, Bloody Mary, who lures Cable off to the pleasures of Bali-Ha’i ("Someday you'll see me floatin' in the sunshine") and some “Happy Talk” in a volcanic hot tub with her underage daughter. Well, to cut a 3 hour musical short, Emile gets his Forbush and Joseph doesn’t return from scout duty... But while all the serious stuff is going on, the comedy is provided by glistenly homoerotic cross-dressing marines who fail to convince that aren’t really very happy with each other as it is thank you very much with songs like “There Ain’t Nothing Like A Dame”, who collectively run a laundry on the beach and who really are the ones who are "as corny as Kansas in August"...

Rather scarily, in a critically hammered 2001 TV version, Nellie Forbush was played by Glenn Close. She was 54 at the time, and didn't have a strong reputation for playing naive young Southerners...

my father as South Pacific - the movie

I have more memories of my father as he did not leave this world until I was 13. Many are dusty and shoved away into an attic in my brain, others are quite fresh, bouncing back to life with a key stimulus. In this case the movie, South Pacific (1958).

No, I didn't see him as Rossano Brazzi! And he couldn't sing, nor was he a murderer in fact or fiction, and he didn't live in a world where sudden colour-shifts took place. My mother had been a singer and had taken lead roles in musicals, and could easily have played Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor). This may have explained my father's passion for live and film musicals - all of which I went to see.

I remember very clearly being taken to see the movie at the plushly theatrical Roxy Picture House in Leicester. I can remember being bowled over by the scale and colour, the fabulous songs, and the incredible exotic (I suppose 'foreign' would have been the word then) landscapes - but not the length of the movie (3 hours), nor that it had an intermission. I can clearly remember the length and the intermission in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). OK this was 4 years later, was epic, long, had lots of sand, camels, blown-up trains, sword-wielding Arabs, and Peter O'Toole giving the Turks what for (and missed the significance of what they gave back to him) - and while it did have a huge and haunting orchestral soundtrack, it didn't have any songs...

I watched the movie for the second time in my life in December 2007 in Whitstable. It was a revelation. So many things look totally different from my childhood memories. South Pacific did in some respects, but it was also so faithful to my (near 50 year old!) memory. The scale, colour, songs, scenes, wonderfully exotic landscapes and Rossano Brazzi were the same. The subtexts invisible to an 8 year old in the 1950s were glaringly obvious now. The homo-eroticism of the servicemen, the overt racism/sexism, the status/class divisions, the dysfunctional storyline and continuity. I wonder how much of this was obvious to my father?

This was all kicked-in by a cactus on my table in the lounge of my hotel in Helsinki - there was one on each table - this seemed the happiest. We had a very sad version of the same variety which used to survive in the hallway of the house where I lived with my father. It never got any sun.

On a brighter note, I now know that the movie was shot on location in Hawaii, Bali and Tioman - at least I've been to Bali...