His Majesty O'Keefe (1954)

Expected more

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

An average albeit unusual action adventure drama set in the South Seas (it was filmed on the Fiji islands) of the Pacific Ocean which stars Burt Lancaster, and hundreds of island natives. Additional support is provided by Joan Rice, André Morell, Abraham Sofaer, Archie Savage, Benson Fong, and Philip Ahn (among others). It was directed by Byron Haskin, and was written by Borden Chase and James Hill from a novel by Gerald Green and Lawrence Klingman.In the 1870s, coconut oil is a valuable resource which is derived from the dried meat or copra of the fruit. Lancaster plays a sea captain - the titled O'Keefe - and would-be copra trader that finds himself on the island of Yap after his hungry overworked crew were driven to mutiny by his greedy but unfulfilled quest.Yap is wrought with palm trees filled with coconuts that the local representative of a German trading company Alfred Tetins (Morell) has been unable to have harvested for the two decades that he's lived there. It seems that the native islanders can't be motivated to work; their only interest lies in FEI, large round stones that can only be obtained through great human cost from a distant island.Upon returning to Hong Kong, O'Keefe finds an unlikely partner in dentist Ahn, whose nephew (Fong) becomes the captain's first mate. When the crew of O'Keefe's "new" junk is near starvation, they happen upon the island where the Yap natives mine the FEI. It's there that O'Keefe meets the lovely daughter of an Englishman (Rice). While he doesn't force the captain to marry her, a shotgun wedding was initially threatened (later, a Hong Kong wedding is thrown for the couple by the dentist).Using gunpowder, O'Keefe shows the Yap medicine man (Sofaer) how much faster the FEI can be mined. This leads to a conflict between two tribal leaders, one (Savage) who believes that the traditional way of obtaining the stones in the only way and another (Tessa Prendergast) who strikes a trade agreement with O'Keefe.Naturally the Germans, that employ Tetins and a pirate aptly named Bully (Charles Horvath), aren't too happy with the arrangement. After Bully burns the Yap's huts and imprisons them, O'Keefe rescues the natives, who decide to make the captain their king.

An entertaining, empire-building South Seas saga, director Byron Haskin's "His Majesty O'Keefe" qualifies as an above-average adventure yarn with a robust Burt Lancaster charging hither and yon as he battles enemies both native and European. Mind, "His Majesty O'Keefe" isn't as good as "The Crimson Pirate" and "The Flame and the Arrow." "His Majesty O'Keefe" isn't a fantasy like either of those movies, but it always manages to sling in a surprise or two when you have resigned yourself to less. The cinematography is gorgeous, and it doesn't appear that the producers used miniatures for the sea-going voyages.Lancaster plays Savannah born, sea-bred stiff David Dion O'Keefe whose dreams and ambitions are both remarkable. Things get off on the wrong foot when we meet him in the 1870s. O'Keefe's crew cries mutiny aboard his ship and allows him to drift with the currents for his life. Miraculously, O'Keefe survives and winds up Barely on the island of Yap. A heavily mustached German trader Alfred Tetens (André Morell of "Dark of the Sun") nurses O'Keefe back to health with the aid of a medicine man Fatumak. O'Keefe scouts out the island and notices lots of coconut trees. If you've never heard of 'copra,' prepare to become knowledgeable. O'Keefe imagines that he can parlay prosperity by gathering coconut meat, designated as "copra," that contains a profitable oil. Around him, he sees nothing by lazy tribesmen and he tries to recruit them as labor. The natives have more on their minds than copra and picking coconuts. They are more fascinated with something called 'fei,' sacred stones collected from a faraway island as extreme cost and manpower to them. The shady O'Keefe helps the islanders with their fei harvest. Generously, he furnishes dynamite to dislodge the rock, and he follows that up with fast transportation back to the island. Just as they are dividing up the stones, O'Keefe intervenes in their ceremony and makes his demands. Drama ensues and apparently lifetime enmity. One of the chieftains, Boogulroo (Archie Savage of "Assignment: Outer Space"), objects to this chicanery. The Borden Chase & James Hill screenplay has more on its mind than just putting Lancaster and his adversaries through the usual swashbuckler shenanigans. "His Majesty O'Keefe" provides an inventory of the usual catalog of the clichés of seafaring and empire building epics. Haskin never wears out his welcome and the movie is literally bursting at its 90 minute mark. André Morell is exemplary in his supporting role as the German trader, while Lancaster rules the show with another of his dynamic performances. Guy Doleman of the Harry Palmer spies movies has a small role as a German official.

The last of Burt Lancaster's adventurous star vehicles is easily the weakest: bland, dreary and unmemorable yet contriving to be a colorful and pleasant diversion nevertheless; apparently, he plays an actual larger-than-life adventurer who became the ruler of a Fijian island. Andre' Morell and Abraham Sofaer round up a rather unremarkable cast as a German trading agent and the native (and benign for once) witch doctor.The film has an excessive quota of local color via a succession of tedious native ceremonies but only a handful of the expected action sequences – although, what little there is, is adequately enough staged (including a hand-to-hand combat between Lancaster and a rebellious native chieftain who eventually comes to accept O'Keefe as his sovereign). An unusual element to the narrative which is, however, never brought to fruition is the native's reverence for a local stone they call "Fei". Needless to say, the strapping (and frequently bare-chested) Lancaster turns the girls' heads wherever he goes – in particular that of an Afro-sporting native girl and his future wife, Asian Joan Rice.The film was released on DVD by Warners as part of a rather undistinguished "Burt Lancaster Signature Collection" but I still intend to get my hands on the rest of them in the future; for the record, I already have the best of this bunch i.e. Jacques Tourneur's THE FLAME AND THE ARROW (1950).

Rowdy, masculine, adventurer David O'Keefe (Lancaster) sees millions of dollars of copra ready to be harvested from the coconuts on Yap, a South Sea Island. The local representative of a German trading company (Andre Morell) is sympathetic but hopeless: the "natives" are too lazy to work because they already have everything they want, and money is not among the things they want. Lancaster finally finds out what motivates the natives to work -- "fei." It's a kind of local currency, but it's stone, harvested from a distant island and involving a dangerous voyage to and fro. Using dynamite instead of hand picks, Lancaster brings them more fei than they can eat, and the Yapese elect him king. He and his supporters defeat incursions by Bully Hays and the German trading company (at the cost of Morrell's life) and he marries a Caucasian girl and everyone lives happily ever after.It's a bully movie, full of the kind of raw capitalism that produced Diamond Jim Brady and the Gilded Age of McKinley and colonialism generally. It's marvelous seeing Lancaster do his own stunts. And Joan Rice is a perfect innocent virgin.Lancaster has a tooth damaged in a fist fight with Bully Hayes. He is taken to a Chinese dentist and is asked whether he'd like expensive gold, that will last longer, or cheap tin. "Tin," replies Lancaster in the dentist's chair, "and drive it in to last." Most of us wouldn't have said that. The film was shot in the 1950s in Fiji, in Melanesia, not in Yap, in Micronesia. There are physical differences between the populations, but it doesn't affect the fun of the movie.Lancaster was never more fit than here. He bounces around with his Hollywood-shaved pectorals, and defeats every physical challenge. It's only the moral questions that finally leave him nonplussed.I saw this in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as a school kid with my date, and she translated the German for me. Now, after having spent two years studying the natives on a Polynesian Island as an anthropologist, I can follow the native language about as well as Eleanor followed the few words of German. What curious twists Clio, the muse of history, provides us.For what it's worth, the story of fei is real. Fei was valuable for the same reason that gold (or any other mineral or gem) is valuable. It's hard to get. You had to work like nobody's business to find some. It's called the "value added" theory of goods. You add value to some commodity because of the labor that has gone into the getting of it, as Freidrich Engels and others have pointed out. (Fresh air is worthless because no value had been added to it, so nobody charges you to breathe. Compressed air at the gas station costs money because it has been worked on.) Fei is made of stone. On Yap, in real life, a boat with some fei was sunk offshore, but the fei was not lost. Since everyone knew it was out there, although at the bottom of the ocean, it was still used as currency. Well -- why not? Is it that much different from our printing more Treasury bonds when WE need money? Just substitute paper for stone. The danger illustrated in this movie is that if you use modern mining methods to collect fei, you get too much of it and it becomes worth less. Ditto for printing too much money. How did I fall into this disquisition? End of confusing economics lesson.This is something more than just another action flick in an exotic setting. It puts Lancaster in something of a dilemma. Which is more important -- profit or social responsibility? The question has resonance.