South Pacific 50 Years After Film First Came Out

We biked over to the Bear Tooth Monday night for their 50th anniversary of the movie South Pacific. (The picture is getting ready to ride home at about 11:15 pm after the movie. It had an intermission about two hours into the movie.) Not long ago I posted about Out North's production of Hair "forty years later." It's hard to imagine that only ten years separate Hair and South Pacific. Actually a few more, because it was opened on Broadway on April 7, 1949 according to Wikipedia. I grew up listening to Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, but I'd never seen the movie South Pacific.

I was worried it was going to look terribly dated (and the quality of the film - especially when they did special lighting effects - was pretty awful. ) But it was mostly musicals, songs I could sing along with. We have the Broadway album with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza. Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi played the main roles in the movie.

And the underlying theme was interracial marriage - listen to the short clip of "You've got to be taught (to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade, you've got to be carefully taught...) There was even one black man among the mostly bare chested sailors dancing and singing on the beach. This was 1949, pretty amazing. Before Brown v. Board of Education and all civil rights movement in the 1960s. (Spike Lee recently criticized Clint Eastwood for not having any black soldiers in his 2006 film Letters from Iwo Jima. And life has many strange connections. It was in a talk at Cannes where he was discussing his new film about the Buffalo Soldiers whom I just learned about Sunday from a real Buffalo Soldier at the Juneteenth Celebration.)

I don't know how these songs would strike young listeners who'd never heard them before, but since the first Broadway revival just won seven Tony's it must be connecting with somebody. I would note that Oscar Hammerstein, who did the music for this and many other great broadway shows, was like an uncle to Stephen Sondheim who created Sweeny Todd and many other musicals.




The Broadway South Pacific website has some beautiful (great internet quality) videos of the cast in the recording studio. Definitely worth a check.

[I keep mentioning the bikes because if a couple of 60 somethings can ride bikes around town, maybe the rest of you will think about it too. We just ask before we leave, "Can we do this by bike?" and if we aren't running really late or don't need to carry something too big or too heavy and it's not raining, we usually say "Yes."]