Broken Arrow was a big hit so 20th Century Fox got Delmer Daves to try his hand at another tale of doomed inter-racial love, with Debra Pagent and Jeff Chandler returning as beautiful native girl and noble savage respectively. Instead of James Stewart as the white guy who falls in love with the native there's Louis Jourdan, who is handsome but also French so the culture clash isn't as obvious - not to my English speaking ears, anyway.
A couple of other things make this less effective than Broken Arrow. There's not the underlying conflict between cultures - no colonialism, despite Jourdan's Frenchness; Chandler is educated in the USA and is mates with Jourdan from school there. Jourdan goes native on the island pretty much straight away, walking around in a sarong most of the time, reducing culture clash. Most of the conflict comes not from a logical source, i.e. people squabbling over land, but due to a witch doctor going "tsk tsk" at him being on the island.
There is some pleasing scenery - location work - and it's shot in colour. I enjoyed the scenes of the natives and Jourdan surfing - this must be one of the first surf movies. It's fun to see characters called "Kalua" and "Kahuna". And there's a very effective bit where Jourdan comes across an English beachcomber, Everett Sloane, who lives in paradise with a family but who hates it.
But it's a silly movie. There's not much of a story, just Jourdan falling for Paget and dealing with native superstition and frolicking in the water. The deaths in Broken Arrow were a tragedy; here Paget is an idiot for walking into a volcano, and their society is idiotic for letting it happen. And after a while I didn't care about the people or anything they did.
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