King of the Islands

Warren Hymer is shipwrecked on the island of Wally-Wally, where Wini Shaw is scheduled to be thrown into a volcano, but nothing will stop her singing 'The Love Song of Kalua'.

Despite a certain amount of production numbers and mugging on the part of Hymer, the point of a lot of these early Technicolor shorts was to show off the Technicolor process. In this one, the dominant theme is variations on earth colors, browns and greens -- even the flowers are distinctly brownish -- to show off the naturalistic aura of the South Seas and the rather boring good taste of Natalie Kalmus, the ex-wife of Technicolor's founder. Eventually she was shipped off to Britain, where her advice was ignored by Powell and Pressberger.

Still, Miss Shaw is pretty and the chorines dancing the hula are graceful. There's also some interest in this as a technical artifact in the evolution of color in the movies.