By Robert Nisbet
We were all romantic heroes, back in 1958. We’d line the good guys up, go with them scrapping, outwitting villains, wooing and winning the girls, the final clinch, the fade-away, the ever-after. South Pacific was tricky, from the very start. De Becque the hero was the same age as our Dads, and his little boy and girl too much to cope with, even with Mitzi Gaynor as the prize. But then the sub-plot came and we found our hero, Lieutenant Cable, and after mystery journeys and boat trips through exotic seas, he found the girl, a pearl of South Sea Island beauty. We were settling to the film’s rhythms now, De Becque and Cable off to war, a matter of time, surely, before they foiled the enemy, went back for the final clinches, fade-away, the ever-after. And Cable died. Uneasily, some half-hour later, we stumbled home, with a lot to assimilate. A native girl? Were they saying it was all for the best? Was that the idea? It was bloody sad, all the same.
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet widely-published in Britain, where he won the Prole Pamphlet Competition in 2017, and in the USA, where he is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
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