Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

James Hitchcock In 1944 U.S. Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant James O'Hearn is facing a court martial for desertion, theft, scandalous conduct and destruction of property, charges which in time of war carry the death penalty. ("Scandalous conduct" in this context means sex outside marriage; if that were to be regarded as a capital offence under military law I suspect that the fighting strength of most of the world's armies would be drastically reduced overnight). The above might suggest that this is a serious courtroom drama along the lines of "The Caine Mutiny". Admittedly, the film starts off in serious vein, but as soon as Ginger Martin (she with whom O'Hearn allegedly conducted himself scandalously) takes the stand seriousness goes out of the window and it descends into ridiculous comedy.Ginger is presumably the "South Sea Woman" of the title, but she is actually a white American rather than a Polynesian and only finds herself in the South Seas by chance. When O'Hearn first meets her she is working as a showgirl at a nightclub in Shanghai, where his regiment is stationed, and is the girlfriend of his friend Private Davy White. An attempt by White to slip away to marry Ginger leads to the three finding themselves adrift at sea on a small motor boat. In a series of increasingly farcical misadventures, in the course of which they inadvertently commit the acts which will form the basis of the charges against O'Hearn, they are rescued by a Chinese junk and eventually cast away on the French-ruled island of Namou. As the Governor of Namou is pro-Vichy, and as the attack on Pearl Harbor has now brought America into the war, the two Marines have to pretend to be deserters in order to avoid being interned. White and Ginger attempt to marry several times, but are always frustrated. It is at this point that the film changes direction again, largely abandoning comedy and turning into a patriotic wartime adventure as O'Hearn and White discover a fiendish Nazi plot and decide to take action to thwart it, to seize a boat and to rejoin the Marines who are fighting the Japanese at Guadalcanal. Mixing genres in this way is often a risky business, the risk being that the resulting film can end up as neither fish nor flesh nor fowl nor good red herring, or in this case neither drama nor comedy nor action. I don't think there was ever any possibility of this film being a sort of "Caine Mutiny Court Martial", but it could certainly have been made either as a comedy about the adventures of a pair of bungling Marines and a girl or as a standard gung-ho action war film about two heroic Marines with a sub-plot about their love-interest. The attempt to make the film as a combination of these two approaches simply results in a misbegotten dog's breakfast, a film which is not very amusing when it tries to be a comedy and not very exciting when it tries to be a wartime adventure. About all one can say for it is that Virginia Mayo looks lovely, as she normally did. This is not quite Burt Lancaster's worst movie; he normally saved his worst for those occasions, mostly in the sixties and seventies, when he allowed his political judgement to overcome his artistic judgement and ended up playing a villainous right-wing fanatic in turgid, paranoid left-wing thrillers like "Executive Action" or "The Cassandra Crossing". It is not, however, one of his better ones, and is one that is probably best forgotten by all but the most obsessive Lancaster fans. 4/10

SanteeFats Not very funny for a movie labeled as a comedy. Sergeant Major O'Hearn is being court martialed for desertion. After all he was AWOL for nine months.Chuck Connors plays a PFC hero. He has the Silver Star and the Navy Cross before the film even starts. He dies when he climbs a Jap ship's stack and throws some TNT down it. This blows up the ship and Connors. Burt Lancaster is O'Hearn. He refuses to testify until the he must to clear the record about Connors being a deserter. Then everything comes out in the open. It is still not very funny. Virginia Mayo is the love interest, first of Connors and then of Lancaster. Her testimony starts things in motion which leads to O'Hearns deciding to testify. This movie is well acted and well written but it is not comedy by any stretch of the imagination.

zardoz-13 The Marines have landed! "Rhubarb" director Arthur Lubin's wartime comic escapade "South Sea Woman" with Burt Lancaster and Chuck Connors unfolds ostensibly as a military court-martial melodrama interspersed with flashbacks as two agile Jarheads vye for the affections of beautiful Virginia Mayo. This 1953, black & white, 99-minute, Warner Brothers' theatrical release teems with action galore in those flashback sequences as our heroes tangle with the Japanese Navy during the Guadalcanal campaign in the South Pacific. Lubin doesn't waste a second of those 99-minutes and "Stalag 17" scenarist Edwin Blum doesn't like the exposition get in the way of the action in Earl Baldwin and Stanley Shapiro's adaptation of William Rankin's stage play. Actually, it appears as if this patriotic World War II actioneer was lensed by three-time Oscar nominee Ted McCord of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" fame.

Spikeopath Sergeant James O'Hearn is standing on trial for a number of serious misdemeanours, refusing to testify or even state his defence, the outlook is very bleak. Much against his wishes, good time girl Ginger Martin takes to the stand and the whole case against O'Hearn is going to be seen in a very different light. A tale of loves, friendships, rivalry's, bad luck, but most of all, heroism in the line of duty.The genre police have tagged this picture as an action/comedy/romance set just prior to the Pacific hostilities in WWII. That it's a multi genre piece is a given, that it's also an odd bit of cinema is also very much understandable. That's the only real complaint with South Sea Woman, it's so jaunty and full of fun that when we get to the wonderful, bold and tough last quarter, you are not exactly sure how to feel. It's like entering a fancy dress party and winning first prize but then suddenly being told the prize is for worst costume of the night!Anyway, the cast seem to be having a right laugh with it, Burt Lancaster (0'Hearn) and Chuck Connors (Davey White) are constantly at loggerheads about their participation in the conflict, and the direction they should be taking (humouressly so), because right in between them is Virginia Mayo (Ginger), sparklingly pretty she's all set to marry White, but O'Hearn is doing his hardest to ensure that that doesn't happen. This is the mainstay of the film, we (they) lurch from one fight to another, from one daft encounter to the next, bad luck and sheer bravado constantly zipping around with our protagonists, and then the shift to full blown drama. It ties up all the loose ends, and it in no way is a cop out ending, in fact far from it, but it does take some getting used to and even some time after the credits have rolled I personally was a bit bemused.It's a recommended film, if only for the sparky cast it is worth it, but just go into it expecting a whisk in the blender and you will be OK. 6/10