As a star, Burt Lancaster was very good at employing the "one for the Pope, one for me" method i.e. he would alternate artier fare such as Come Back, Little Sheba with genre pics like this.
This was one of two south sea movies he made (the other was South Sea Woman) - he also did pirate movies, westerns, a Foreign Legion film, etc. Here he plays an adventurer who in the 19th century arrives on the island of Yap and tries to make money from copra.
Even in 1953 this story has got very uncomfortable colonial overtones - the film is aware of it and sort-of tries to deal with it by having O'Keefe initially a cynical adventurer who then finds heart through his love for a nearby half-caste native girl (Joan Rice) and who then comes to realise that he shouldn't encourage the locals to retrieve a religiously important rock in a more efficient way. Or something.
The script is also careful to emphasise that the locals come to love O'Keefe and ask him to stay on as their king, and that he fights off nasty pirate Bully Hayes. Oh and he has the de riguer scene for liberal Hollywood films of the 50s - a white character says a racist comment about a character (in this case his wife) and O'Keefe smacks him one.
It's still a bit dodgy, especially considering the island of Yap is shown to be quite happy and content when O'Keefe arrives i.e. he doesn't bring anything to the party and really we know they'd be better off had he never come along. Also O'Keefe doesn't really suffer for the nasty things he does except to have his wife yell at him (you can handle someone being a scamp and unscrupulous provided (a) they're funny and (b) they go through a really hard time - look at the Flashman novels).
In The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter there's an interview with Borden Chase, one of the writers, who said that the making of the film is a bit of a mess and you can tell.
The colour photography is stunning as are the locations - it looks wonderful. Part of pre-production took place in Australia, where director Byron Haskin hired a number of Aussie actors who appear in the film - Muriel Steinbeck, Grant Taylor (blink and you'll miss him as a German), Guy Doleman, Lloyd Berrell - though there's only one Aussie character. So it only has a tentative connection, really, to Australia. NB even though Lancaster was stacked with muscles at this point in his life he still seems to suck in his gut.
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