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South Pacific and American Remembering; or, “Josh, We're Going to Buy This Son of a Bitch!”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Philip D. Beidler
Philip D. Beidler
Affiliation:
Professor of English at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, U.S.A.
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Extract

For many post-1945 Americans, the title South Pacific does not describe a text so much as a process of remembering. For the cultural historian, it offers an account of production. It is the relationship of these that will be my subject. The pattern of the former will largely depend, of course, on the rememberer – something of a book perhaps, a play, a movie, a song, another song. The latter, albeit complicated, is traceable. It has a literary provenance in a 1947 collection of fictional narratives by James A. Michener entitled Tales of the South Pacific, variously described as short stories or a novel, but always noted as winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In translation to Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 Broadway classic, it adds another Pulitzer and a paperback fortune for the original honoree: to one of the most celebrated runs in the golden era of the American musical. It parlays that success into one of the first widely popular 33⅓ RPM long-playing records, memorialized in its dramatic connection by a cover photograph of Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in the lead roles of U.S. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush and French planter Emile DeBecque. It then reappears as a 1958 movie musical spectacular, leading to another joyride of the Michener narrative on the best-seller lists, and to yet another best-selling LP, now in stereo, with the cover photo of the lovers, here Mitzi Gaynor and Rozzano Brazzi, resituated against a Hollywood backdrop of wide-screen tropical splendors. Along the way, it proliferates into endless road productions and revivals; television showings and VCR rentals; re-recordings and new recordings on LP, tape, and compact disk.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , August 1993 , pp. 207 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Michener, James A., South Pacific (New York: Macmillan, 1947).Google Scholar

2 Davis, Thomas, Two-Bit Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 133.Google ScholarMichener, James A., The World is My Home (New York: Random House, 1992), 329.Google Scholar

3 Davis, , 213.Google Scholar

4 The oddity of this, when one thinks about it, may be suggested by the only corresponding instance, to my knowledge, of such a proposition's ever being ventured about the World War II Germans. It occurs in Mel Brooks' movie, The Producers, in which an ideas-man, at the end of his imaginative tether, comes up with a Nazi musical entitled “Springtime for Hitler.” One may cite, of course, such disparate aberrations as Hogan's Heroes, or Rodgers and Hammerstein's own eventual Sound of Music. These concepts, however, would rely on the notion of the “good German,” an idea for which, as noted by John Dower, “no Japanese counterpart” would ever exist “in the popular consciousness of the Western allies”: Dower, John, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 8. Such a bifurcation was required for the Germans, particularly in post-holocaust regard, probably because in their very occidental heinousness, they remained too much like us. Indeed, the only alternative recourse in humorous depiction would lie in the black comedy, say, of a Thomas Pynchon. The Japanese, being wholly other, allowed for the ease of erasure conventionally applied to the other. One could simply make them invisible. In contrast, the Germans remained both easily other and uneasily same.Google Scholar

5 Ibid.

6 Michener, , South Pacific, 3.Google Scholar

7 For a complete survey of the genre, see Dooley, Roger, From Scarface to Scarlett: American Films in the 1930s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 205–16.Google Scholar

8 Michener, , World is My Home, 290.Google Scholar

9 Rodgers, Richard, Musical Stages: an Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1975), 258.Google Scholar

10 Logan, Joshua, Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life (New York: Delacorte, 1976), 209–10.Google Scholar

11 Rodgers, , 259. The two main plots were tied together by a behind-enemy-lines reconnaissance-mission subplot involving DeBecque (who survives) and Cable (who dies) drawn, as is not generally acknowledged, from the plot of another story introducing the shadowy American operative Tony Fry, a recurrent major character in the ensuing text, and his radio mission with the brave, tragic British coastwatcher called “The Remittance Man.” Further to facilitate Billis's enlarged role, one other borrowing was also made for the accidental “diversion” created by having Bilks stow away and then fall into the sea enroute to the DeBecque-Cable “mission” and thereby become the subject of a rescue struggle attracting most of the American and Japanese forces in the area. This, in the original, came from “The Milk Run,” a story involving the pilot Bus Adams.Google Scholar

12 Here, as with “nigger” above, in its American usage the racist term has been culturespecific. As the former has been used to derogate Americans of African descent, the latter was, of course, one of the main racial epithets used by Americans in Vietnam. Its origins, however, go further back in American wars, perhaps including the one in question. One theory connects it with the Korean Conflict, as deriving from a word in the latter language for “foreigner.” Others locate it in the pre-World War II American argot of the Pacific and even as far back as the Philippine Campaigns at the turn of the century.

13 It is surely one of our supreme literary-historical ironies that Mary and her daughter Liat are identified as Tonkinese. That is, they are Indochinese, most likely brought to the islands where the play is set by migrating French colonials. To be exact, this also makes them North Vietnamese, from “Tonkin” China, the region of Hanoi and the Chinese border, as opposed to “Annam” or “Cochin” China, known to us once as South Vietnam.

14 As Paul Johnson has suggested, it may come as close to any American art form to being simply sui generis. Modern Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 227. The underworld stories of Damon Runyon, for instance, could become Guys and Dolls. A musical play about a production of The Taming of the Shrew could produce Kiss Me Kate; Faust, by way of a baseball story by Douglas Wallop, became Damn Yankees. Romeo and Juliet could get street-ganged into West Side Story. For Rodgers and Hammerstein in particular, a run of such far-fetched transformations had already been effected: a minor play by Lynn Riggs called Green Grow the Lilacs, with a modern dance script by Agnes DeMille, had become Oklahoma!; a second-rate melodrama, Liliom, by an obscure central European, Ferenc Molnar, had become Carousel.Google Scholar

A prestigious recent consideration of the form, Gerald Bordman's, involves a highly elaborated aesthetic eventuating in one volume on American operetta and one on American musical comedy: American Musical Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; American Operetta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar This would seem quite beside the point. The point, rather, would seem to be exactly the wildly syncretistic nature of the form itself, a form adapted in fact, as a quite specific contextualized “vehicle” for American expression predicated on the multifarious demands of audience appeal it prepared to meet.

15 Coffin, Rachel, ed. New York Theatre Critics' Reviews. Volume X. Number 11. Week of 11 04 1949, 312.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 312, 313.

17 Laufe, Abe, Broadway's Greatest Musicals (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1973), 130.Google Scholar

18 How fully this was the end of an era for Broadway was marked by a notable conjunction of big time sports with the overnight ascendancy of television. An object case: in 1947, the World Series was telecast for the first time, and Broadway theaters underwent a 50 per cent decline in revenues. This Fabulous Century, 1940–1950 (New York, Time-Life, 1969), 266.Google Scholar

19 It would also be the Mary Martin hairstyle seen shortly in the enormously popular Broadway production, again among the first to be seen on national TV, Peter Pan, and again setting off sundry reverberations in popular fashion.

20 Sanjak., RussellFrom Print to Plastics: Publishing and Promoting America's Popular Music (1900–1980) (Brooklyn, NY: I.S.A.M. Monographs, 1983), 39.Google Scholar

21 Murrells, Joseph, Million Selling Records (London: B. T. Botsford, 1984).Google Scholar In the age of Michael Jackson, it is hard to remember the significance that such figures once could claim. One might note, for instance, that the sheet music to the show at the time sold 2 million. Laufe, , 128.Google Scholar

22 Oddly, someone found it necessary to dub Juanita Hall. One further prophetic “Tonkinese” connection is also worth mentioning: the casting of France Nuyen as Liat. Nguyen is the most common of all Vietnamese names. On the other hand, one can find such racial ghosts throughout. In the Broadway original, for instance, the “Polynesian” children were played by Hispanics. One of the DeBecque servants was also played by Richard Loo, everyone's movie caricature of the despicable Japanese officer.

23 As a measure of the skyrocketing attention paid to the 50th state, in contrast to the mild interest shown in the 49th, one can cite in the latter case but one movie: North to Alaska.

24 Thus the relocation of South Pacific, Michener's South Seas movie of a book to every American tourist's possible movie dream of a South Seas isle. And thus, however, also one last other strange merging of entertainment with proximate Pacific history that cannot go unmentioned in the Hollywood connection. And that is the relation of all this to that utter anomaly of the period, the funny movie about World War II against the Japanese. To be sure, some of these, such as Mr. Roberts, themselves began as novels transferred to the stage. (In fact, as noted, the producer of South Pacific, Joshua Logan, was working on the stage version of Thomas Heggen's serio-comic book Mr. Roberts when he first heard about Michener's book, which, turned down by MGM as a stand-alone, had been suggested as a source of background color.) Others, such as Don't Go Near the Water, moved from book to movie. But most seemed mainly to spin off their own bizarre momentum. The list is staggering: Francis, the Talking Mule; Operation Petticoat; Ensign Pulver; The Wackiest Ship in the Army; Father Goose. If the “War Without Mercy” had been bought for a song, it often proved worth a laugh as well.

25 It is all over the extensive liner notes with which the tape is accompanied. James Michener himself is even invoked suggesting “that although neither Cable nor Nellie is originally able to overcome personal prejudice to marry Liat and DeBecque respectively, it is Nellie, the Southerner, who is better able to deal with her conflicts than Cable, the Philadelphia-born, Princeton-educated Northerner.”

26 Feingold, Michael, “Heat-Seeking Bomb,” Village Voice, 23 04 1991, 91.Google Scholar

27 Stone, Robert, “‘Miss Saigon’ Flirts with Art and Reality,” New York Times, 7 04 1991, Sec. 2., 30.Google Scholar