The last of Burt Lancaster's adventurous star vehicles is easily the weakest: bland, dreary and unmemorable yet contriving to be a colorful and pleasant diversion nevertheless; apparently, he plays an actual larger-than-life adventurer who became the ruler of a Fijian island. Andre' Morell and Abraham Sofaer round up a rather unremarkable cast as a German trading agent and the native (and benign for once) witch doctor.
The film has an excessive quota of local color via a succession of tedious native ceremonies but only a handful of the expected action sequences although, what little there is, is adequately enough staged (including a hand-to-hand combat between Lancaster and a rebellious native chieftain who eventually comes to accept O'Keefe as his sovereign). An unusual element to the narrative which is, however, never brought to fruition is the native's reverence for a local stone they call "Fei". Needless to say, the strapping (and frequently bare-chested) Lancaster turns the girls' heads wherever he goes in particular that of an Afro-sporting native girl and his future wife, Asian Joan Rice.
The film was released on DVD by Warners as part of a rather undistinguished "Burt Lancaster Signature Collection" but I still intend to get my hands on the rest of them in the future; for the record, I already have the best of this bunch i.e. Jacques Tourneur's THE FLAME AND THE ARROW (1950).
The film has an excessive quota of local color via a succession of tedious native ceremonies but only a handful of the expected action sequences although, what little there is, is adequately enough staged (including a hand-to-hand combat between Lancaster and a rebellious native chieftain who eventually comes to accept O'Keefe as his sovereign). An unusual element to the narrative which is, however, never brought to fruition is the native's reverence for a local stone they call "Fei". Needless to say, the strapping (and frequently bare-chested) Lancaster turns the girls' heads wherever he goes in particular that of an Afro-sporting native girl and his future wife, Asian Joan Rice.
The film was released on DVD by Warners as part of a rather undistinguished "Burt Lancaster Signature Collection" but I still intend to get my hands on the rest of them in the future; for the record, I already have the best of this bunch i.e. Jacques Tourneur's THE FLAME AND THE ARROW (1950).