Publisher: CinemaSerf March 2, 2025
Though still infinitely better than the syrupy 1980 remake, this is still a film that time has been pretty brutal to. The premiss is amongst the most natural we can imagine: a young girl and boy are shipwrecked on a tropical island and as they mature, so does their relationship. Partly out of necessity and partly out of choice, the two - "Emmeline" (Jean Simmons) and "Michael" (Donald Houston) effectively become a couple. Aside from Stewart Granger (and maybe Kirk Douglas), I never really saw a man who could match Simmons on screen. She seemed to be able turn her hand to anything, creating a characterisation effortlessly with those piercing eyes and that almost silent movie star demeanour. Here she portrays the epitome of curiosity and naivety, with a soupçon of vulnerability really quite well. Houston, on the other hand, has a charm-free wooden-ness about him that probably made even he realise that he only got the girl because, well, there was nobody else! Their story evolves along fairly predictable lines, with some fun interjections from the always reliable Noel Purcell ("Paddy"), James Hayter ("Murdoch") and Cyril Cusack ("Carter"), with some beautiful Fijian cinematography, and Frank Launder does manage to combine a certain sense of the idyllic and the dangerous well enough too. Sadly, though, a better leading man was needed to balance this narrative and the older it gets the less attractive it becomes to watch.