Synopsis
South Pacific (1958) is a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Joshua Logan. It carries the record-breaking Broadway show to the screen, itself drawn from James Michener's Pulitzer-winning Tales of the South Pacific.
It's 1943, on an island base far behind the Pacific front. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, a small-town girl from Arkansas, falls for Emile de Becque, an older French planter with a past and two mixed-race children. Nearby, Marine lieutenant Joseph Cable loses himself to a young islander named Liat. Both romances run into the same wall — the prejudice each lover carried north from home. Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor and John Kerr headline.
The score is why it endures: "Some Enchanted Evening," "Bali Ha'i," "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair," standards before the cameras even rolled. Logan shot in Hawaii and Fiji and pushed whole scenes through saturated color filters — a gamble critics argued over for years and nobody forgot. Two and a half hours, unhurried and sure of itself. Stream South Pacific (1958) online on iFILM.
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