His Majesty O'Keefe

I've mentioned it in the past, but I'm still surprised that after 17-plus years of blogging, it's still not uncommon for me to find an old movie that I had never heard of before, and not even just obscure B movies or foreign stuff. One such example from a big studio (Warner Bros.) and with a big star (Burt Lancaster) is His Majesty O'Keefe.

Lancaster plays David O'Keefe, a ship's captain in the early 1870s who, just as the movie opens has been subjected to a mutiny by his crew somewhere in the Pacific. He's put on a rowboat and has the great good luck of drifting to an inhabited island called Yap (a real place in Micronesia although the movie was made in large part in Fiji) that has a westerner on the island. That westerner is Tetins (André Morell), a German who has the job of getting the locals to pick the coconuts for the copra that the coconuts yield when the coconut meat is dried; copra was in the 19th century valued for its oils that were useful in making soap.

The good people of Yap, for their part, aren't that interested in doing this sort of work as they're happy with what they've got and don't understand western ways of doing business. Besides, their own culture sees something known as "fei", a type of giant stone used as currency and seemingly unavailable on Yap, as more important than the western stores of value. However, they also have a tradition where someone can challenge the traditional chieftain to trial by combat. O'Keefe does this and earns the respect of the local Yap leader to the point that he's able to earn some money from the copra and get passage to Hong Kong on the next German ship that comes to collect the copra.

At this point, O'Keefe begins to let power go to his head. He has visions of grandeur that are going to require his getting a boat and getting back to Yap to be able to harvest the copra on an industrial scale. On one of his voyages, O'Keefe winds up on the island of Palau, which just happens to be where the fei comes from. Also on Palau is an Australian serving the same function as Tetins on Yap, a man with a mixed-race daughter Dalabo (Joan Rice). O'Keefe takes to Dalabo but goes too fast which results in his having to get married to her.

Even more power goes to O'Keefe's head when he organizes the locals on Yap to fight off an invasion by a would-be slave trader who has been preying upon Pacific islands. But there are still powerful business interests in the copra trade out there, and they've got the backing of nations that can bring much more to bear than any one business interest.

His Majesty O'Keefe is based on a real person, although I don't know exactly how much the story here holds to the real O'Keefe's story. In any case, it's the sort of material that well suited Burt Lancaster at this point of his career when he was still doing action stuff that highlighted his physicality. The location cinematography is also quite nice. The story is a bit formulaic, but just about good enough.