Bardlerx Strictly average movie

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

SanteeFats Not very funny for a movie labeled as a comedy. Sergeant Major O'Hearn is being court martialed for desertion. After all he was AWOL for nine months.Chuck Connors plays a PFC hero. He has the Silver Star and the Navy Cross before the film even starts. He dies when he climbs a Jap ship's stack and throws some TNT down it. This blows up the ship and Connors. Burt Lancaster is O'Hearn. He refuses to testify until the he must to clear the record about Connors being a deserter. Then everything comes out in the open. It is still not very funny. Virginia Mayo is the love interest, first of Connors and then of Lancaster. Her testimony starts things in motion which leads to O'Hearns deciding to testify. This movie is well acted and well written but it is not comedy by any stretch of the imagination.

bkoganbing In a recent biography of Burt Lancaster the only two things that were mentioned about South Sea Woman was that it enabled him to fulfill a commitment to Warner Brothers on a three picture deal and that he was instrumental in getting Chuck Connors the part of his fellow Marine in hijinks. Other than that this one is strictly minor league Lancaster.The title role of South Sea Woman is played by Virginia Mayo who the two have a rivalry over. The story is narrated from several perspectives at a court martial that Lancaster is undergoing. These two manage to miss the withdrawal of Marines from Shanghai which occurred a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. Lancaster wants to get back to the outfit especially when they get news of the Japanese attack, but Connors has Mayo on his mind, he wants to get married.Not since the Errol Flynn film Desperate Journey also by Warner Brothers was there ever a more lighthearted approach to war. These two guys also manage to liberate a Vichy governed French colony and turn it over to the Free French and from said island recruit a crew to get to Guadalcanal where they do distinguish themselves in their own private action. All this related to a rather incredulous court martial board. What was interesting was that Burt Lancaster did two films at once. While this was shooting Lancaster went over to the set of Three Sailors And A Girl and did a small walk-on role in his Marine uniform costume in that musical. With that he fulfilled a three picture commitment the other being The Flame And The Arrow in which he also co-starred with Virginia Mayo. The comedy was kind of forced and while it had a few laughs in it South Sea Woman is clearly a film that Lancaster wanted to get off his plate and move on. That year of 1953 he also did From Here To Eternity a much better film about the start of the Pacific War.

mark.waltz This is the type of film that James Cagney and Ann Sheridan would have done 10 years before, and got away with. (Actually, they did a similar one, called "Torrid Zone"). Burt Lancaster, having dealt with Pearl Harbor invasions the same year in "From Here to Eternity", finds himself as another marine, this time in danger of being court-marshaled for a variety of crimes, including being AWOL during wartime. As each crime is addressed, we are witnesses to flashbacks of what actually took place. In scenes that cry out for color, Lancaster's adventures of his love/hate relationship with photo gal Virginia Mayo are presented. The court martial set up is very serious, then all of a sudden as the flashbacks occur, the flow of the film switches to a cartoon like pace. Lancaster, in court, refuses to defend himself, even not even plead "not guilty", and this sets up questions as to why. There is also the absent character of Mayo's fiancée, whom we later see in the flashbacks as played by Chuck Conners. If anything, Lancaster's silence is probably because he knows that the so-called facts are so ridiculous that nobody would believe them. But as each of the "facts" are revealed, Lancaster has no choice but to testify, and when he does, we still never figure out really why he would choose not to cop a plea in the first place. He looks so uncomfortable here. It appears that the writers took all of their loony tune scripts and put them into live action format. It all starts with the sinking of a saloon, then goes into the theft of a yacht and ends on a battle with the Japanese that probably had Marine officers squirming with disbelief that an American film company could present such tripe with a straight face. Mayo, as the titled "South Sea Woman", is Ginger (not Mary Ann), and isn't even shipwrecked. The film really isn't even about her, or the other South Sea Woman who has four nieces that Lancaster makes out with simultaneously. The only reason I gave this a rating as high as 4 was I had so much fun laughing at what was wrong with it. Between this and "His Majesty O'Keefe" (also adrift in the Pacific), Lancaster must have really been desperate for dry land.

howardmorley I found my way to this film after seeing Veola Vonn playing "Arlette" a voluptuous painter's model in "Le Fantome de la rue Morgue" (1954) which is loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe novel.On looking at Veola's film career she seemed to specialise in acting roles playing French ladies of easy virtue and the subject film is typical when she plays Lillie Duval a madame of a brothel on a remote French island.Although she was born in NYK.(1918-1995), I wondered whether she had French parents/relatives or connections to give substance to these roles.Virginia Mayo first came to my attention in "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) playing the initially good-time wife of Dana Andrews a returning bombardier officer from the U.S.A.F. being demobbed at the end of WWII.In this film Virginia as "Ginger Martin" shows off her very feminine figure to its best advantage and soon gets Chuck (The Rifleman) Connors (Pvt.Davey White) & Burt Lancaster (Sgt. O'Hearn) squabbling over her and how best to get back into WWII on the side of Uncle Sam.For Burt it must have made a change doing this knockabout comedy after filming the heavy dramatic acting required playing another sergeant in "From Here To Eternity (1953)" in the same year.Coincidentally both films have the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour as a theme.Another face I spotted was Paul Burke (The Naked City - 1960s TV series) playing an ensign at Sgt.O'Hearn's court marshal.Obviously the plot outlined in other user comments above is comedic and Hollywood stereotypes abound which include (from an American perspective,) all foreigners who cannot speak English but we must remember that these films were produced by Americans for average Americans.I would place the growing international maturity of U.S. film producers from 1962 with "The Longest Day".One obvious editing device used in "South Sea Woman" is to utilise B&W war newsreels of the real WWII U.S./Japanese conflict and splice them into the subject B&W film. Also used were back-projection screens with "real" studio action by the actors.Oh well, c'est la guerre.I rated it 6/10 on purely on an entertainment level.