THE BLUE LAGOON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 527, 29 July 1949, Page 17

THE BLUE LAGOON

(Rank-Individual) HE alarm bells ring, the passengers assemble*on deck, and as the lifeboats are launched with a splash into the deep blue waters of the Pacific, Britain’s latest (and best) technicoloured idyll of the South Seas gets under way. The Blue Lagoon was a great success when it first appeared as a novel by H. de Vere Stacpoole. In this screen ‘version, featuring Jean Simmons as Emmeline and Donald Houston as Michael, its appeal should be as imme-' diate, as wide, and at about the same level of taste, If you want to sneer at the sight of young love on an uninhabited island a thousand miles north of Auckland, then stay away from this film. A cynic could shoot. it as full of holes as a gorgonzola, but why should he? It ds first-class entertainment for anyone’ wanting to relax and forget about the All Blacks for a while. Its keynote is innocence, and the atmosphere is so carefully maintained that when sex does appear it is kept to what might be called a proper perspective, The main objection to the film as purely adult fare is the fact that the story is as patently unbelievable as Rousseau’s theory of the noble savage, which the youngsters conform to in their ten years on the island. Readers of the novel will remember the part where Emmeline finds her baby under a palm tree (tropical version of the gooseberry bush). Well, that moment is more or less paralleled in the film when Michael, cauglt in a hurricane while out fishing, hastens ‘to the cave where: he knows she. will go for shelter, and finds her there with the. baby at her side. Life isn’t like that? That’s just where The Blue Lagoon scores, It isn't life; so that you accept the absence of mosquitoes, the herculear fight with the octopus, the villainous blackbirders, the miraculously appearing tropical garments, and all the other bits of obvious’ unrealism the film contains, _ Life is simple, life is sweet. Sydney Gilliat and_ Frank Launder have tried to say little ‘more than that in the film, an ‘the m imum of mental effort is ired, the. mind ‘gives itself up lan to the surge of breakers on the reef, the breeze amongst the palms, and the moon shining on the lovers in their leaf-thatched hut by the shore. The colour. is especially restful to the eyes, better in’ fact than. anything I’ve seen since) The Stone Flower, and the camera has plenty of scope amid the tropical reds, greens, blues and yellows which make the setting of the film,