South Sea Woman

The early years of World War II is the setting for this action comedy starring Burt Lancaster, Virginia Mayo, and Chuck Connors (his biggest role to date). Directed by Arthur Lubin, it features an Edwin Blum screenplay from a William Rankin-Stanley Shapiro adaptation of William Rankin's play.

Lancaster plays Master Gunnery Sergeant James O'Hearn, whose court martial trial has just begun (Hayden Rorke plays the prosecutor and Cliff Clark is among the officers who sit in judgment). After a series of outlandish sounding charges are read, O'Hearn declines the opportunity to defend himself. However, his court appointed attorney (Bob Sweeney) will mount a defense anyway. A series of witnesses recall the events that lead to the charges, and flashbacks are used to tell their stories.

Ginger Martin (Mayo in the title role) was a displaced showgirl in Southeast Asia that Marine Private Davey White (Connors) was to marry before his Sergeant and mentor O'Hearn intervened. A barroom brawl and their ensuing fight causes the men to miss their ship on its way to sea. Further circumstances keep the AWOL Marines, with Ginger in tow, from returning right away. In fact, for months they are stranded on a remote island commanded by Vichy French sympathizer Pierre Marchand (Leon Askin).

After enjoying the pleasures of hotelier Lillie Duval (Veola Vonn) and her girls, O'Hearn learns that Dutch Captain van Dorck (Rudolph Anders) is really a Nazi that's been placing radar equipment throughout the South Pacific. He then frees or convinces the real deserters, who have made the island their home (including Arthur Shields), to join his plan to steal van Dorck's yacht, after which they discover and disrupt a Japanese invasion fleet by attacking it!

The details of the battle and the outcome of the trial are intertwined; Strother Martin appears as a spectator.

Sergeant James O'Hearn is standing on trial for a number of serious misdemeanours, refusing to testify or even state his defence, the outlook is very bleak. Much against his wishes, good time girl Ginger Martin takes to the stand and the whole case against O'Hearn is going to be seen in a very different light. A tale of loves, friendships, rivalry's, bad luck, but most of all, heroism in the line of duty.

The genre police have tagged this picture as an action/comedy/romance set just prior to the Pacific hostilities in WWII. That it's a multi genre piece is a given, that it's also an odd bit of cinema is also very much understandable. That's the only real complaint with South Sea Woman, it's so jaunty and full of fun that when we get to the wonderful, bold and tough last quarter, you are not exactly sure how to feel. It's like entering a fancy dress party and winning first prize but then suddenly being told the prize is for worst costume of the night!

Anyway, the cast seem to be having a right laugh with it, Burt Lancaster (0'Hearn) and Chuck Connors (Davey White) are constantly at loggerheads about their participation in the conflict, and the direction they should be taking (humouressly so), because right in between them is Virginia Mayo (Ginger), sparklingly pretty she's all set to marry White, but O'Hearn is doing his hardest to ensure that that doesn't happen. This is the mainstay of the film, we (they) lurch from one fight to another, from one daft encounter to the next, bad luck and sheer bravado constantly zipping around with our protagonists, and then the shift to full blown drama. It ties up all the loose ends, and it in no way is a cop out ending, in fact far from it, but it does take some getting used to and even some time after the credits have rolled I personally was a bit bemused.

It's a recommended film, if only for the sparky cast it is worth it, but just go into it expecting a whisk in the blender and you will be OK. 6/10

The least significant entry in Warners' 5-Disc "Burt Lancaster Signature Collection" is this obscure but harmless WWII action comedy that is sufficiently enjoyable without being remotely memorable. The film starts out with Lancaster refusing to defend himself in the court-martial he is facing and the events unfold in flashback as the various witnesses give their testimony: Lancaster is a U.S. marine who (together with his pal Chuck Connors and the latter's fiancée Virginia Mayo) 'deserts' to a tropical island on the eve of the Pearl Harbor sneak attack where they proceed to live it up over there for a while, in the company of local madame (Veola Vonn), her three nieces and assorted beachcombers (including Arthur Shields). However, when a Dutch captain visits the island on his yacht, Lancaster and Co. steal it to go "have a crack at those Japs" – to borrow Errol Flynn's famous last words in Raoul Walsh's DESPERATE JOURNEY (1942); this leads to a rousing action climax in which the renegade band of islanders take on the Japanese fleet and manage to sink one of their ships – with Connors sacrificing his life in the process and leaving the way open for the budding romance between Lancaster and Mayo (reunited here three years after their joint participation in Jacques Tourner's colorful adventure, THE FLAME AND THE ARROW) to bloom. Two final things worthy of note: a young Strother Martin is clearly recognizable sitting next to Mayo in the courtroom and the eventual fate of the seaside dive might well have inspired a similar incident in, of all things, PORKY'S (1982)!!

In 1944 U.S. Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant James O'Hearn is facing a court martial for desertion, theft, scandalous conduct and destruction of property, charges which in time of war carry the death penalty. ("Scandalous conduct" in this context means sex outside marriage; if that were to be regarded as a capital offence under military law I suspect that the fighting strength of most of the world's armies would be drastically reduced overnight).

The above might suggest that this is a serious courtroom drama along the lines of "The Caine Mutiny". Admittedly, the film starts off in serious vein, but as soon as Ginger Martin (she with whom O'Hearn allegedly conducted himself scandalously) takes the stand seriousness goes out of the window and it descends into ridiculous comedy.

Ginger is presumably the "South Sea Woman" of the title, but she is actually a white American rather than a Polynesian and only finds herself in the South Seas by chance. When O'Hearn first meets her she is working as a showgirl at a nightclub in Shanghai, where his regiment is stationed, and is the girlfriend of his friend Private Davy White. An attempt by White to slip away to marry Ginger leads to the three finding themselves adrift at sea on a small motor boat. In a series of increasingly farcical misadventures, in the course of which they inadvertently commit the acts which will form the basis of the charges against O'Hearn, they are rescued by a Chinese junk and eventually cast away on the French-ruled island of Namou. As the Governor of Namou is pro-Vichy, and as the attack on Pearl Harbor has now brought America into the war, the two Marines have to pretend to be deserters in order to avoid being interned. White and Ginger attempt to marry several times, but are always frustrated.

It is at this point that the film changes direction again, largely abandoning comedy and turning into a patriotic wartime adventure as O'Hearn and White discover a fiendish Nazi plot and decide to take action to thwart it, to seize a boat and to rejoin the Marines who are fighting the Japanese at Guadalcanal.

Mixing genres in this way is often a risky business, the risk being that the resulting film can end up as neither fish nor flesh nor fowl nor good red herring, or in this case neither drama nor comedy nor action. I don't think there was ever any possibility of this film being a sort of "Caine Mutiny Court Martial", but it could certainly have been made either as a comedy about the adventures of a pair of bungling Marines and a girl or as a standard gung-ho action war film about two heroic Marines with a sub-plot about their love-interest.

The attempt to make the film as a combination of these two approaches simply results in a misbegotten dog's breakfast, a film which is not very amusing when it tries to be a comedy and not very exciting when it tries to be a wartime adventure. About all one can say for it is that Virginia Mayo looks lovely, as she normally did.

This is not quite Burt Lancaster's worst movie; he normally saved his worst for those occasions, mostly in the sixties and seventies, when he allowed his political judgement to overcome his artistic judgement and ended up playing a villainous right-wing fanatic in turgid, paranoid left-wing thrillers like "Executive Action" or "The Cassandra Crossing". It is not, however, one of his better ones, and is one that is probably best forgotten by all but the most obsessive Lancaster fans. 4/10

This was the best thing that Chuck Conners ever did. And Burt Lancaster was made to make Marine movies. Unfortunately,, Burt did not emerge until his next film, From Here to Eternity, where he had only a minor skirmish with the attacking Jap planes on Pearl Harbor. This film predates that one, and shows Burt as a crazy as can be jarhead; not to mention his sidekick, Chuck Conners, an even crazier jarhead. Between the two of them they stop a reinforcement of Guadacanal by Japanese troops and sink a battleship to boot. A bit reminiscent of African Queen with Bogart's final scene. This would be the PERFECT midnight cult film. I could see it now; the chicken marriage ceremony outfit, guys dressed up like marines, girls dressed up like islanders, bad Germans, bad Frenchmen , good Frenchmen, and one or two other costumes. This film is HIGHLY underrated, and is a hidden gem. It has more action than most other war films, and a decent amount of comedy to boot; not to mention a trial! The movie has everything but the kitchen sink, and is probably the reason Lancaster was cast in the lead for From Here to Eternity. DO NOT MISS THIS GEM!