Pacific Paradise

This MGM musical short visits a Hawaiian resort. I give this credit for showing a tourist promotional version of Hawaii. They start out with outriggers and surfing. That's worth a point. This must be still eye-opening for middle America. This may be the first time most of them would see real surfing. Cliff Edwards is the M. C. I could do without an old white guy playing the ukulele and making the stupid joke about cannibal locals. It's strictly resort entertainment for the most part. Consider the era, this is still exotic for the still-not-State territories. I would like to get out of this resort beach and the entertainment complex, but it's fine for what it is.

Terrible acting, terrible script, fake Hula and palms, even fake Hawaii, not even the best songs from Owens. Why?

Cliff Edwards is the master of ceremonies in this short featuring the the Hawaiian music of Harry Owens & His Royal Hawaiians and the Royal Hawaiian Hula Girls.

Hotcha! It's the second movie directed by George Sidney and gives zero hint of his long career in mostly light entertainment. Also, despite the hints in the titles, it wasn't filmed anywhere near Hawaii, but at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. Given the overwhelming presence of steel guitars in every piece of music, it quickly grows tiresome, despite the manic grin that Edwards sports. It take only a few minutes until he pulls out his ukulele and starts singing, but the staging lets you know everyone is trying wa too hard for far too little effect.

Pacific Paradise (1937)

*** (out of 4)

MGM musical short features Cliff Edwards introducing the (then) famous Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians as well as the Royal Hawaiian Hula Girls. I had to look up who Harry Owens was before watching this and realized that he was fairly popular back when this was released and the hotel in Hawaii is still a popular resort today for various celebrities. This short features three different songs as well as dance numbers to go along with them. Most of these MGM shorts are just like promo reels where they show off new talent in front and behind the camera and this one here is rather interesting as it's director Sidney's first credit. He would later direct such films as Show Boat, Annie Get Your Gun and the Elvis hit Viva Las Vegas, His direction here actually adds a lot to the film because the dance numbers are actually pretty good as is the cinematography and even the editing struck me as being a lot better than what we'd normally get.

This pleasant musical short from MGM features Cliff Edwards guest starring with Harry Owens who reached the height of his celebrated song writing career this particular year.

Owens was the conductor/director of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel Orchestra on Waikiki in Honolulu. The hotel is still there and still catering to the many visiting celebrities who go to Hawaii. Owens wrote many popular Hawaiian style ballads.

Bing Crosby in fact recorded many of them and had this been done at Paramount he would have done the short instead of Cliff 'Ukelele Ike' Edwards. For that year one of Owens's songs was put in Bing's film Waikiki Wedding and Sweet Leilani won the Academy Award that year for Best Song.

Of course the Oscar ceremony which would have been held next year so the Oscar to be for Sweet Leilani wasn't mentioned. But the song from another studio's film was, a rarity indeed back then.

Cliff Edwards did introduce the Hawaiian Drinking Song which never got the popularity of Sweet Leilani. Still it was nice to put a face to the name of Harry Owens.