Post #323771 by bigbrotiki on Tue, Aug 7, 2007 7:14 AM

I must admit I find South Pacific hard to watch. Kind of like West Side Story. I love the sets, the colors, the costumes...but as soon as the characters break into this operatic singing, I cringe. Unbearable to watch for me. Hard to believe, but there ARE things that can be too kitschy, too tacky, even for me.

The first time I got to see it was spectacular, it was a special screening at the the Zoo Palace in Berlin, on the HUGE screen. That was before Tiki. For me as a contemporary cinematographer, the use of those pink soft-edge filters to enhance the "romantic" mood was an experience of shock and disbelief, like "they didn't really do that, did they?".

BUT it had an indelible impact on America, and thus was a main ambassador of Polynesian pop:

From "Cold War Orientalism---Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961" :

Donald Henahan recalled that Rogers & Hammerstein's songs achieved a level of ubiquity in the late 1940s and early 1950s that few contemporary songwriters could match: "Few inhabitants of America in 1949 could have failed to know every dramatic nuance and singable note of South Pacific...the Rogers score penetrated every layer of American culture...For years, no American ear could escape...The songs oozed out of every radio and television set, assailed one in elevators, restaurants and washrooms. A generation of susceptible youth could hardly escape them, and did not try."