Rowdy, masculine, adventurer David O'Keefe (Lancaster) sees millions of dollars of copra ready to be harvested from the coconuts on Yap, a South Sea Island. The local representative of a German trading company (Andre Morell) is sympathetic but hopeless: the "natives" are too lazy to work because they already have everything they want, and money is not among the things they want. Lancaster finally finds out what motivates the natives to work -- "fei." It's a kind of local currency, but it's stone, harvested from a distant island and involving a dangerous voyage to and fro. Using dynamite instead of hand picks, Lancaster brings them more fei than they can eat, and the Yapese elect him king. He and his supporters defeat incursions by Bully Hays and the German trading company (at the cost of Morrell's life) and he marries a Caucasian girl and everyone lives happily ever after.
It's a bully movie, full of the kind of raw capitalism that produced Diamond Jim Brady and the Gilded Age of McKinley and colonialism generally. It's marvelous seeing Lancaster do his own stunts. And Joan Rice is a perfect innocent virgin.
Lancaster has a tooth damaged in a fist fight with Bully Hayes. He is taken to a Chinese dentist and is asked whether he'd like expensive gold, that will last longer, or cheap tin. "Tin," replies Lancaster in the dentist's chair, "and drive it in to last." Most of us wouldn't have said that. The film was shot in the 1950s in Fiji, in Melanesia, not in Yap, in Micronesia. There are physical differences between the populations, but it doesn't affect the fun of the movie.
Lancaster was never more fit than here. He bounces around with his Hollywood-shaved pectorals, and defeats every physical challenge. It's only the moral questions that finally leave him nonplussed.
I saw this in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as a school kid with my date, and she translated the German for me. Now, after having spent two years studying the natives on a Polynesian Island as an anthropologist, I can follow the native language about as well as Eleanor followed the few words of German. What curious twists Clio, the muse of history, provides us.
For what it's worth, the story of fei is real. Fei was valuable for the same reason that gold (or any other mineral or gem) is valuable. It's hard to get. You had to work like nobody's business to find some. It's called the "value added" theory of goods. You add value to some commodity because of the labor that has gone into the getting of it, as Freidrich Engels and others have pointed out. (Fresh air is worthless because no value had been added to it, so nobody charges you to breathe. Compressed air at the gas station costs money because it has been worked on.) Fei is made of stone. On Yap, in real life, a boat with some fei was sunk offshore, but the fei was not lost. Since everyone knew it was out there, although at the bottom of the ocean, it was still used as currency. Well -- why not? Is it that much different from our printing more Treasury bonds when WE need money? Just substitute paper for stone. The danger illustrated in this movie is that if you use modern mining methods to collect fei, you get too much of it and it becomes worth less. Ditto for printing too much money. How did I fall into this disquisition? End of confusing economics lesson.
This is something more than just another action flick in an exotic setting. It puts Lancaster in something of a dilemma. Which is more important -- profit or social responsibility? The question has resonance.
It's a bully movie, full of the kind of raw capitalism that produced Diamond Jim Brady and the Gilded Age of McKinley and colonialism generally. It's marvelous seeing Lancaster do his own stunts. And Joan Rice is a perfect innocent virgin.
Lancaster has a tooth damaged in a fist fight with Bully Hayes. He is taken to a Chinese dentist and is asked whether he'd like expensive gold, that will last longer, or cheap tin. "Tin," replies Lancaster in the dentist's chair, "and drive it in to last." Most of us wouldn't have said that. The film was shot in the 1950s in Fiji, in Melanesia, not in Yap, in Micronesia. There are physical differences between the populations, but it doesn't affect the fun of the movie.
Lancaster was never more fit than here. He bounces around with his Hollywood-shaved pectorals, and defeats every physical challenge. It's only the moral questions that finally leave him nonplussed.
I saw this in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as a school kid with my date, and she translated the German for me. Now, after having spent two years studying the natives on a Polynesian Island as an anthropologist, I can follow the native language about as well as Eleanor followed the few words of German. What curious twists Clio, the muse of history, provides us.
For what it's worth, the story of fei is real. Fei was valuable for the same reason that gold (or any other mineral or gem) is valuable. It's hard to get. You had to work like nobody's business to find some. It's called the "value added" theory of goods. You add value to some commodity because of the labor that has gone into the getting of it, as Freidrich Engels and others have pointed out. (Fresh air is worthless because no value had been added to it, so nobody charges you to breathe. Compressed air at the gas station costs money because it has been worked on.) Fei is made of stone. On Yap, in real life, a boat with some fei was sunk offshore, but the fei was not lost. Since everyone knew it was out there, although at the bottom of the ocean, it was still used as currency. Well -- why not? Is it that much different from our printing more Treasury bonds when WE need money? Just substitute paper for stone. The danger illustrated in this movie is that if you use modern mining methods to collect fei, you get too much of it and it becomes worth less. Ditto for printing too much money. How did I fall into this disquisition? End of confusing economics lesson.
This is something more than just another action flick in an exotic setting. It puts Lancaster in something of a dilemma. Which is more important -- profit or social responsibility? The question has resonance.