The strange expat education of Nellie

During the British heatwave summer of 1959 the songs from the film South Pacific were everywhere. They drifted out of radios, and open windows, and if you were a child wandering about in short pants with nothing much to do except ride your bike and play cricket with a tennis ball, it was impossible not to absorb them to some extent.

I had not seen the movie, but that hardly mattered because the melodies were inescapable. “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i,” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” lodged themselves in the brain like particularly determined mosquitoes. By the end of the summer I knew half the songs without ever having been near a cinema or having any idea what the movie was about.

I should add that in 1959 I was only eight years old, so learning the songs from that musical was one of my first small steps into the wider culture beyond the front door of home. Long before I understood anything about Broadway, Hollywood, or the South Pacific islands, or even the United States, for that matter, those tunes were already circulating in the air like a kind of informal education.

That was not unusual, because the soundtrack album from South Pacific became one of the best-selling recordings in history, and for years it seemed that every household with a gramophone owned a copy. Today the entire film can be watched free of charge on YouTube, which is a reminder that technological progress occasionally works in the direction of generosity rather than scarcity.

The film is widely considered one of the greatest movie musicals ever made, and certainly the greatest expatriate love story, though modern viewers often remember the scenery and songs more readily than the story. This is a pity because the story was incredibly daring for its time.

The musical itself was written in 1949 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, based on Tales of the South Pacific, a collection of short stories by James A. Michener, and it addressed questions of race and social hierarchy long before these subjects were comfortable topics in American popular entertainment.

At first glance the plot looks like ordinary wartime romance. Two love stories unfold on a tropical island during the Second World War. Beneath the palm trees and orchestral strings, however, the script is systematically dismantling the social assumptions of the era.

Consider the structure of the American military world portrayed in the film. The nurses are reserved for the officers and are off limits to enlisted men, even though the enlisted sailors who appear on screen look suspiciously like Rock Hudson and rarely bother to wear shirts to cover their torsos. Rank determines who may dance with whom, and social boundaries are enforced with the same firmness as military discipline.

It should also be remembered that the film does not exactly portray the social realities of wartime Polynesia. In the real Pacific theatre thousands of young servicemen suddenly found themselves stationed on small tropical islands, and relationships with local women were hardly rare.

By the time the story reached the screen, however, Hollywood was operating under the Production Code, which placed strict limits on how sexual relationships and interracial themes could be portrayed. The result is a slightly sanitized world in which enlisted men sing cheerfully in the background while the romantic complications are confined to a few carefully framed storylines. In that sense the film becomes even more remarkable, because despite those restrictions it still managed to address questions of race and prejudice more directly than most American films of the period.

Outside this American hierarchy stands another layer of society represented by the islanders, including the formidable Bloody Mary and her daughter Liat. They provide goods, music, and occasionally romance, but they are not treated as social equals by the Americans who rely on them.

One of the film’s most revealing moments occurs almost immediately when a character dismisses Bloody Mary as a nobody because she is Tonkinese. The remark passes quickly and without moral commentary, yet it reveals the colonial attitudes that sit beneath the cheerful surface of the story.

Against this background the two central romances unfold.

The first involves Lieutenant Joseph Cable, a young upper-class American officer who falls in love with Liat but ultimately cannot overcome the social consequences that such a marriage would bring in the United States. The tragedy of that storyline lies in the fact that Cable recognizes the injustice yet lacks the courage to defy it.

Modern audiences might also notice another aspect that passed with little comment in the 1950s. We are never told exactly how old Liat is. All we learn from the lyrics is that she is “younger than springtime,” which is poetic but not particularly precise. In the cultural atmosphere of the period the romance was presented as wistful and tragic, yet viewers today might feel a faint unease about the ambiguity since, in the quaint Hollywood custom of the time, Lieutenant Cable always keeps his pants on, but rarely wears a shirt.

The second romance involves Nellie Forbush, the exuberant Navy nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas, and the generation-older French plantation owner Emile de Becque.

Nellie often describes herself as a “hick from Little Rock,” but the evidence on screen suggests something quite different. She is educated enough to serve as a Navy nurse, comfortable among naval officers, socially confident enough to routinely accept the offer of a cognac, and articulate. Whatever else she may be, she is not a barefoot Arkansas farm girl.

In fact she looks and behaves very much like a respectable middle class American young woman who has been brought up with certain ideas about social boundaries. Her first crisis arrives when she discovers that Emile has two children from an earlier relationship with a Polynesian woman who died. The existence of those children forces her to confront something she had never previously examined. In a film that otherwise keeps wartime relationships discreetly offstage, those two mixed-race children reveal that the reality of island life was more complicated than the Production Code preferred to admit.

There is also an odd moment later in the story that tends to pass without much discussion. At one point Emile refuses to participate in a dangerous reconnaissance mission, saying that the only thing that matters to him is his future life with Nellie. The declaration is meant to be romantic, but it raises a small logical question. Emile already has two children on the island, yet he seems to have completely forgotten that they exist. Perhaps this is simply a slip-up in the script, or a reminder that even great musicals occasionally bend logic slightly in the service of drama.

At this point the musical introduces its most famous and controversial number, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” which argues that prejudice is not instinctive but learned during childhood.

For audiences in 1949 this was a bold claim. The United States still lived under widespread legal segregation, and the civil rights movement had not yet entered its most visible phase. The idea that racial prejudice was something taught by parents and communities rather than something natural was an uncomfortable message for many viewers.

The film version appeared in 1958, only a year after the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock had made the city a global symbol of the American racial conflict. By that time the repeated references to Nellie’s hometown carried an unintended historical resonance that the writers could never have anticipated.

One aspect of the film that has often attracted criticism is its heavy use of colored filters during musical sequences. Scenes shift suddenly into washes of blue, red, or amber light that can look rather strange to modern eyes. The effect may partly have been an attempt to echo the stylized lighting of the original stage productions. There may also have been a practical reason. The film was shot largely on location in Hawaii, where tropical weather can change rapidly from one moment to the next. Filters may have helped smooth out differences in light and color between separate shots and maintain visual continuity.

Yet the deeper insight of the story remains surprisingly modern. Prejudice is not portrayed as the property of villains or extremists. Instead it is shown as something that ordinary, cheerful, decent people may carry without realizing it.

Nellie Forbush sings, laughs, and radiates optimism, yet she also embodies the quiet social boundaries of the world that produced her. The drama of the story lies in watching her recognize those limits and decide whether she is willing to step beyond them.

For a musical remembered mainly for palm trees, sailors, and a woman vigorously shampooing away her romantic troubles, that is not a trivial achievement.

It also explains why those songs from that long hot summer still hover somewhere in the back of the mind. I was eight years old at the time and had no idea that the cheerful tunes drifting out of radios and open windows carried a complicated story about race, class, and human prejudice.

All I knew then was that the melodies were catchy and impossible to escape. Sixty-odd years later that remains the case.