One of the most important Rules of Life is said to be "Never play cards with a man named Doc", and there should perhaps be another one reading "Never go into partnership with a man whose nickname is Bully".
Dan Merrill and Bully Hague are adventurers who go into partnership in the pearl fishing business. Their plan is to exploit the waters around an unnamed South Sea island which are believed to be a particularly rich source of valuable black pearls. Although the film has a contemporary setting in the 1950s the island is a curiously old-fashioned place. It has never been colonised by any Western power and is virtually unknown to outsiders. Moreover, the islanders know equally little about the outside world. The only white men on the island are an old man named Michael and his son George. Michael has managed to get himself elected High Priest of the islanders' religion and the unofficial king of the island, largely because he has taught them a few useful things such as how to fish with nets instead of spears. For the most part, however, Michael's main aim is to preserve his subjects from the pernicious influence of the outside world which he sees as a place of evil and corruption. He does not welcome the arrival of Dan and Bully and their crew, but is wise enough not to try and drive them away by force.
The plot also includes a love-triangle involving Bully, Dan and an attractive blonde named Rita, who is not only Bully's current girlfriend but also Dan's ex. In the course of their voyage, however, Rita decides that she really prefers Dan after all, much to Bully's fury. The triangle develops into a love-pentagon when George also falls for Rita, even though he already has a beautiful Polynesian fiancée. A further development involves Dan and Bully trying to smuggle Rita onto the island disguised as a missionary; exactly why they think this will assist their schemes is never made clear. Nor is it explained why they believe it is incumbent upon female missionaries to dress in Edwardian costume; the clothes worn by the supposed "missionary" Rita were several decades out-of-date even by the standards of 1955.
"Pearl of the South Pacific" is in some ways a typical action/adventure film of its era, only not a very good one. The story of the search for the pearls never generates much excitement, and those scenes involving the giant octopus, supposedly the main source of danger to the characters, are feeble in the extreme. None of the acting rises above the barely adequate, and in some cases falls well below that level. In other ways, however, there is something offensive, even borderline racist, about the storyline, with its stereotyped portrayal of South Sea islands as untouched, unspoilt societies inhabited by simple, unsophisticated people who need the wise guidance of a white guru to keep themselves simple and unsophisticated (for which read ignorant). This is the sort of film they don't make any more. For which we can all be thankful. 4/10
A goof. The islanders refer to Michael as "Tuan", which is a Malay or Indonesian honorific equivalent to the English "sir". Polynesian islanders do not speak Malay or Indonesian, to which their own languages are only distantly related.
