Song of the Islands (1942)

one of my absolute favorites!

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

Enjoyable 1942 film with Bette Grable and Victor Mature in Hawaii. Son of a wealthy scion, Mature falls for Grable while he is trying to get her father, a wonderful Thomas Mitchell, to sell his father, George Barbier, land. The relationship between the two elders is terrific of one of hostility then amiability until a fast working executive tries to evict Mitchell from the land for non-payment of taxes.Jack Oakie steals the show as Mature's sidekick. Hilo Hattie, as the Hawaiian woman who has designs on Oakie, belts out those Hawaiian songs and acts as a Jewish mother by constantly feeding Oakie.The songs of Hawaiian and American style are great and it's too bad that the film was just an hour and eighteen minutes.

Apart from the fact that Victor Mature gets to act alongside of Thomas Mitchell, and the story is set in Hawaii, there is nothing to commend this film. Some of the Hawaiian characters are Americans made up to look Hawaiian. The characters are one-dimensional, and the story fails to engage the audience at any level.I'm not a Betty Grable fan, but she does look good in a straw skirt, and she has a nice back.The film is shot in beautiful Technicolor, but it is not a masterclass in colour grading.I would advise Mature fans to stay away from this film as it comes nowhere near the quality of 'Samson and Delilah'.

I'm not sure but that Song of the Islands was had been done before December 7, 1941 and definitely before US servicemen started bleeding and dying in the South Seas. There certainly is no mention of World War II at all in this escapist Betty Grable film where she's poaching on Dorothy Lamour's south sea territory.I'm sure that Darryl Zanuck must have saw the kind of money that Paramount was raking in with those Dorothy Lamour sarong pictures. So why not put the woman who had risen to be their top musical star in the tropics. They gave Betty a hula grass skirt instead of a sarong, the better to show her legs with. Zanuck was also smart enough not to pass the blond Grable as a native Hawaiian. She's come home to teach school on the island where her father, Thomas Mitchell, has a small place, but also where George Barbier is the absentee owner of a cattle ranch. Barbier's place is run by Hal Spencer, but Victor Mature and Jack Oakie sail over from America to see if they can buy out Mitchell. Mature is Barbier's son and of course when he and Grable meet, the inevitable sparks do fly.Zanuck also put an official Hawaiian imprimatur on Song of the Islands by using Harry Owens to write the music with Mack Gordon's lyrics. Owens was the musical interpreter of Hawaii to the world, his most famous song being Sweet Leilani. And a Hawaiian national treasure named Hilo Hattie also appears in the film, singing in her inimitable style and setting her marriage cap for Jack Oakie.It's all light and pleasant escapist entertainment and Song of the Islands is a good indication of why Betty Grable was the number one pin-up of GIs all over the globe. Except for Rita Hayworth.

Great 1940s World War II Pacific island fantasy movie. The colors are so bright they almost can't be real. Victor Mature and Jack Oakie head to an island where Betty Grable lives in tropic splendor with her father (Thomas Mitchell - Gerald O'Hara from "Gone With The Wind", same Irish accent too by the way...). The music is just fantastic, Harry Owens and his orchestra are incredible, the classic Hula Comedienne Hilo Hattie is on hand as Palola to provide comic relief in her attempts to land Jack Oakie (Jack is afraid of Palola's Cannibal uncle however...). Gloriously non-politically correct in the way that only classic movies can be. Betty Grable in a grass skirt, (wow!) no wonder all the G. I. s you speak to from that time were crazy about her!