Pretty much every film Grace Kelly starred in was popular - this one has a reputation as a dud but in fact it made a profit. No one likes it though and it isn't very good.
It's bewildering what went wrong. It has a lot of things going for it - Kelly of course, but also an ideally cast Stewart Granger (stepping in for Clark Gable, who was meant to star, but the studio took it away when he wouldn't renew his contract), Paul Douglas in support, location filming in Columbia, CinemaScope, great color, and a plot about looking for jewels in Columbia. There's elements which sound exciting - bandits, cave ins, fights - and it looks good, but it's all... flat.
Part of the problem is the story is stagnant. Granger turns up looking for emeralds, and finds them very quickly... near the coffee plantation of Grace Kelly. He spends most of the film hanging around the coffee plantation. They have meals on the verandah, walks in the garden, then they do some mining but it's next door - it's not like say King Solomon's Mines where he was moving around.
There are some villainous bandits but they just sort of turn up whenever need to. Paul Douglas feels extraneous - a sidekick who is Granger's moral conscience, I think. But Kelly is also his moral conscience. They should have made Douglas a villain, or at least funny.
There's also John Ericson as Kelly's brother. He sort of hangs around, then overrules Kelly in helping Granger build the mine, then is killed... to... make Kelly annoyed at Granger, I guess. But Ericson feels pointless. Why not make him a villain too?
Instead we've got this boring drama about Granger being greedy, digging a mine (though the script tweaks it so that Ericson pushes the idea on Granger).
I would have made it that Granger's partner, Paul Douglas, was more ruthless than Granger. I would have had Kelly as an innocent abroad - she has nothing to play as it is, she's just this dim woman hanging around a coffee plantation. If you wanted to keep the stupid coffee plantation I would have had Kelly come out to take it over, and if you wanted to keep Ericson, have him run it into the ground because he was lazy and useless. So Kelly is this hoity toity miss trying to fix her coffee plantation while Granger is swagging around digging for emeralds - this gives Kelly something to do.
I would've added more sexual tension too. The hottest bit is when Granger and Kelly kiss in the rain - at the end. Have this stuff throughout. Make her prim and proper, wanting to be rogered but afraid at the same time etc etc. Not rocket science.
But MGM under Dore Schary struggled with these sort of meat and potatoes broad appeal entertainments.
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