S.O.S PACIFIC (director: Guy Green; screenwriter: Robert Westerby/Bryan Forbes/From story by Gilbert Travers Thomas; cinematographer: Wilkie Cooper; cast: Richard Attenborough (Whitey), Pier Angeli (Teresa), Jean Anderson (Miss Shaw), Eva Bartok (Maria), Eddie Constantine (Mark), Clifford Evans (Petersen), Harold Kasket (Monk), John Gregson (Jack, the pilot), Cec Linder (Willy, co-pilot), Gunnar Möller (Hans Krauss), 1959 - UK)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A seaplane crash lands on the waters of some deserted South Pacific Island and the six diverse passengers plus the pilot and the stewardess on board remove themselves from the wreck and take a dinghy ashore, where they will find things look hopeless and could be getting worse.
The pilot, Jack Bennett (Gregson), is a disgruntled man, carrying on a futile love affair with the attractive stewardess, Teresa (Pier Angeli), and is dissatisfied with this second-rate airline he works for and with his co-pilot, Willy (Linder). Willy is finding it difficult to follow the captain's orders and rebels by doing whatever he wants to do. When the plane makes a fuel stop and picks up some more passengers on a small island, he doesn't get the proper amount of fuel the captain asks him to get because he is anxious to get back to his home and quit this job he dreads and he doesn't want to get stuck in this primitive island waiting for the bureaucrats to finally grant him all the fuel needed. A hurricane warning is issued, but because of the poor radio equipment they have, which was not properly repaired by Willy, the message is cut off and they don't know how serious that storm will be. But Willy's most fatal mistake was to purchase fire extinguishers that were cheap, but would comply in appearance with the air safety codes. It was purchased at the price this airline run on a shoestring could afford, the only trouble was that they were the wrong type of extinguishers for an airplane, and if used, they can cause deadly fumes to be released rather than extinguish the fire. Of course, there was a fire on the plane and the extinguisher was used by a passenger rushing into the cockpit to help out and before he could be stopped by the co-pilot from using it, the damage was done, as the fumes killed the co-pilot and knocked the pilot unconscious.
The two original passengers from the flight are the prim and haughty Englishwoman, Miss Shaw (Jean Anderson), who turns out to be a good egg, after all, and a German physic's professor, Krauss (Gunnar), who is on his way to Australia to accept a teaching position there.
Petersen (Clifford) is a cop on assignment to arrest the brash captain of the Sea Spray, Mark (Eddie), for smuggling. His information that the captain is a smuggler comes from the Britisher, the very slimy Whitey (Attenborough), a weasel if there ever was one. Whitey is given an airline ticket to testify in court against Mark, and if he does that, he will then get his reward money. The handcuffed Mark, when he gets a chance to be uncuffed by the cop who has to go to the bathroom, threatens Whitey by telling him what will happen to him if he testifies in court. This scares the living daylights out of the prevaricator. Mark is the one who mistakenly used the fire extinguisher and was forced to land the plane with the help of the revived pilot, who still had no strength in his hands to navigate it.
Maria (Eva Bartok) is the popular bon vivant world traveler, where every island she stops at is paradise. She is a romantic friend of Mark's but can't get closer to him than that. Her role in the film is never developed, as it is based on a generalization of what someone like her should be like.
The marooned passengers discover that they are on an island that has cattle in lead sheltered buildings and an empty fleet of ships docked around the side of the island and they soon realize that this is an island used as a nuclear-test site, and in a few hours a nuclear-test bomb will explode on the island.
The physic's professor tells them that the next island they see, which is two miles away, has the detonators that will cause the chain-reaction for the bomb to go off and that if they can get to that island they can stop the explosion from occurring. One of the problems, is that Whitey is intimidated by Mark and doesn't like it that the cop has uncuffed his prisoner, so when he gets a chance, he steals the cop's gun and the plane's dinghy, taking it to the next island. The problem now, is that the professor can't swim so he has to teach Mark how to detonate the reactors. In the meantime, Teresa goes diving into the water to find the toolbox in a search for the tools Mark will need to do his mission. She nearly drowns doing this but is saved by Mark, and the two passionately kiss on the beach. This kiss is seen by the dismayed pilot.
The film's ending is routine formula fare, with a few "predictable" surprises of heroism and villainy, the kind of middling story churned out regularly by the studios who lack the imagination to delve into anything but superficial waters. So what you have is familiary known as a typical disaster B- movie, a precursor to all those other movies of this genre that were very popular with audiences from the late '70s- on. The film fits into the formula mold that studios use over and over again, with the obligatory tense action scenes and the typical danger scenes that call for a hero to be manufactured. In this film, Mark acts as a hero and stops the bomb and the crash victims get rescued with two seconds left, or something like that. You know what I mean, everyone who watches films over the years will run across one like this one, which, by the way, wasn't too bad of a film to watch. The actors had enough vigor in them to keep it going, and the story seemed to move along at a brisk and mindless pace.
REVIEWED ON 11/2/99 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
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