Hollywood Tiki: Film in the Era of the Pineapple Cocktail

By Adam Foshko and Jason Henderson

Island Escapes, South Seas Adventures, and Musical Surf Parties of Midcentury Cinema

Tiki Culture arose as the defining expression of American pop culture during World War II and its influence continued through the 1960s. The essence of Tiki featured heavily in films of the era, depicting palm-tree and cocktail-laden escapes that captivated audiences nationwide. Films like South Pacific and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit were a hodgepodge of jungle imagery and World War II Pacific theater memories. A fascination with the new State of Hawaii was reflected in Elvis's Blue Hawaii, while balmy youth flicks like Beach Blanket Bingo and Gidget showcased surf, sun and fun.

Join authors Jason Henderson and Adam Foshko as they explore films about the experiences of war filtered through the tropical splendor that defined an era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781439675595

Adam Foshko

Adam Foshko is an award-winning screenwriter, director and world builder who has worked on the long-running Call of Duty, Skylanders and Destiny franchises, as well as with HBO, MGM and DreamWorks. Jason Henderson is a Locus Bestselling author, WGA Screenwriting Award nominee and a Texas Lone Star List recipient for his Alex Van Helsing series. He is the host of the Castle of Horror/Castle Talk podcast and is the editor of the biannual Castle of Horror Anthology series and was the editor of Nightwalkers, a history of horror.

Book preview

Preface

WHAT IS HOLLYWOOD TIKI?

When we say Hollywood Tiki, we mean a style that appeared in the movies mostly in in the twentieth century. It is shares traits with but is not perfectly synonymous with Tiki Culture.

Tiki is a cultural movement named in equal parts after the popular expedition of the craft Kon-Tiki, which bears as its name what some say is a translation of the name of an Incan god, and Tiki, the Maori first man. It has been written about extensively by writers like Sven Kirsten, who describes Tiki Culture in exhaustively researched books like Tiki Pop, which expounds on the movement’s attendant artistic, architectural and personal styles. The muddled cultural appropriation of the name Tiki itself has ignited conversations about renaming the cultural movement something else, such as Exotica, long the label for music associated with the movement.

Tiki Culture was never about a real place but about the escape to imaginary places—not real Hawaii, but an idea of Hawaii; not any real island, but the idea of an island. A perfect idyllic getaway that was an escape from an industrial postwar life that was the opposite of that.

But the fact that it dominated at all in the context of the postwar period is strange.

In California Tiki, the authors of this book advance the thesis that a key to Tiki Culture’s dominance in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in the United States, was World War II and trauma.

The great strangeness of Tiki Culture was its aesthetic similarity to some of the most beautiful yet haunting geographies of the war. For Tom (the main character in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit), the South Pacific was the place where he landed in battle and ran through shelling (which Paul Fussell called not fighting but suffering) and accidentally blew his friend apart. Tiki created a popular space where men like Tom and wives like Betsy (women who served as WACs and medical personnel) would find entertainment in surroundings that looked like the most vivid moments of their lives. It tamed those lurid memories and turned them into something like a dream.

From Here to Eternity publicity still. Columbia.

In Tiki Pop, Kirsten posits that when shell-shocked vets returned home, no one really wanted to hear stories of bloodied corpses and blown-off limbs. Eager to return to normal life, the GIs themselves willingly forgot about the horrors of battle. In the first instance, he is right: men like Tom did not discuss and others did not want to hear of his pain. But in the second instance, it might be more correct to suggest that rather than willingly forgetting, the veterans sought to sublimate their experiences, to control them and transform them into something new. They could easily have pursued a style of chrome and concrete, but they deliberately opted for a world that mirrored their worst nightmares.

Aloma of the South Seas publicity still. Paramount.

Hollywood Tiki is the expression of this escape at the movies, showing how the need for escape in the economic boom of the twentieth century and the retreat from trauma were reflected as we got farther and farther from the war.

Chapter 1, "Tiki Goes to War: South Pacific and the World War II Experience," focuses on films that take place in and around World War II, particularly in the Pacific theater, but that present the South Pacific as a paradise that shapes one’s world. Examples include Donovan’s Reef (1963), about veterans who have never left their paradise, stuck forever like Odysseus on the island of Calypso; and Mister Roberts (1955), which features the islands as the place for mad R&R.

In Chapter 2, Cocktail Tiki: Bob Hope and Backyard Luau (Sophisticated Adult Tiki Entertainment), we focus on stories that feature the escape into the idyllic fantasy of the South Pacific in (mostly) civilian life. We see the Tiki escape played out in Bob Hope’s shenanigans in Bachelor in Paradise (1961) and soap opera movies like Diamond Head (1962).

Chapter 3, Escape to the Islands, covers films about excursions and escapes to the islands in peacetime, from the vital presentation of Hawaii to the world by Elvis Presley in his three Hawaii movies, starting with Blue Hawaii (1961), to escapist adventure like Fair Wind to Java (1953).

Finally, in Chapter 4, "I Was a Teenage Tiki: Gidget and the World of the Beach Parties," we cover how Tiki Culture reproduced itself in the world of the postwar children, the baby boom generation. Many of these are surf movies. There is some controversy to be addressed here. The authors of this book believe surf movies are a part of Hollywood Tiki, despite the fact that Tiki Culture is distinct from surf culture. First, surf culture is distinct from surf film, as any surf culture aficionado will insist right away. Surf films were mostly music-filled documentary-style movies dedicated to the sport of surfing. Traditionally, the enthusiasts of surf culture love surf films but maintain a queasy relationship with Frankie and Annette and Gidget, the royalty of surf movies. We suggest that in fact the Hollywood surf movie genre fits into the Hollywood Tiki film—they are obviously and unabashedly about escape in a tropical, otherworldly setting. They often have little to do with actual surf culture and everything to do with Hollywood Tiki themes of shirking responsibility and learning one’s way around a new, imaginary world. Besides, doing a book about palmy paradise in the movies and somehow not mentioning Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) would just be bizarre.

Bird of Paradise publicity still. 20th Century Fox.

Donovan’s Reef publicity still. Paramount.

Blue Hawaii lobby card. Paramount.

Beach Blanket Bingo publicity still. American International Pictures.

We think there at least two ways to enjoy this book: first is as a refresher on the popular expression of a cultural movement with a clear start and finish. But second, the book can be used as a handy resource for films to watch for the first time or reapproach if you haven’t seen them in a long time.

Let’s return to Paradise!

Introduction

KON-TIKI AND THE BIRTH OF TIKI CULTURE

For anyone not living under a rock, there has always been enormous speculation about how we humans are all interrelated, how different parts of the world were settled by humanity, and in particular the area of islands that we have come to know as Polynesia.

The prevailing thinking as natural scientists were exploring the world during the first half of the twentieth century was that the people of Polynesia more or less sprang up there organically and—with the exception of some intermingling along the way—were genetically original to the area.

But because this is a book about stories—particularly Tiki stories—and cinematic ones at that, this is where it gets interesting.

Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian explorer and writer who believed that Polynesians, in fact, had come from afar. While pursuing his doctorate, he postulated that people from South America had traveled by boat to Polynesia and settled in Norway. Many of his colleagues disagreed with this theory. They didn’t believe that anyone could have constructed a boat capable of withstanding the treacherous swells and harsh elements across the vast distance—some five thousand miles—of open ocean. This was complicated and dicey in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, let alone pre-Columbian times.

But Heyerdahl was undaunted, so much so that he raised money from his friends (about $22,000 at that time), assembled plans to construct a vessel using only materials that people would have had access to at the time and then put an ad in the paper calling for explorers to come with him on this expedition—a trip from South America to Polynesia. This already sounds like the makings of a Tom Hanks movie.

Kon-Tiki (1950) poster. Sandrew.

Construction began on the vessel—consisting of nine balsa tree trunks, hemp rope, pine splashboards, a deck of split bamboo, a mainsail and a cabin topped with banana leaves. No metal was used in its construction, though Heyerdahl intended to use modern navigational equipment—a sextant, charts and wristwatches—for the journey. He argued that while people of the time did not have these things, the actual hypothesis was more about construction and seaworthiness than navigation.

Heyerdahl and his crew of six—and a parrot—left out of Callao, Peru, and embarked on what would be a perilous voyage, particularly while out in the open ocean at night. Heyerdahl described an event of rogue waves—abnormally large swells—in what might otherwise be categorized as calm seas. These waves seriously jeopardized the small ship they were on—not to mention the harsh weather and the sharks that were their near-constant (and hungry) companions every step of the way.

Ninety-seven days later, the ship struck a reef off the Raroia Atoll. Having traveled the better part of 4,300 miles, Heyerdahl and his crew had proven that a ship of this technological level of construction could indeed make the journey. They were met by local people in canoes from a nearby island and were treated to a massive traditional feast and dancing celebration before going on to Tahiti.

Now there are several points about this undertaking…

Anthropology aside, this expedition was pretty amazing. There was—and still is—an enormous amount of controversy about the soundness of Heyerdahl’s hypothesis and supporting evidence. According to modern genetic analysis, there are definite shared genetic markers and traits between some peoples of South America and those of Polynesia. But what we want to draw your attention to is the fact that

This was all in 1947, and

This makes for one hell of a story, which Heyerdahl himself documented.

HEYERDAHL DIDN’T JUST MOUNT the expedition; he journaled about the entire experience and took pictures. Later, he published a book, and a documentary was produced that won an Academy Award in 1957. The Norwegian expedition crewed by Heyerdahl and a number of World War II veterans was very much a Hollywood story, and a Tiki Hollywood story at that.

Kon-Tiki (2012) poster. Nordisk Film.

Which brings us to Tiki. Heyerdahl believed that the Polynesian people were descendants of people from Peru, said to be fair skinned, blue eyed and bearded people who had founded the Inca civilization. He called them the Tiki People.

Heyerdahl believed in this so much that he even named his ship the Kon-Tiki after a supposed Incan god of that name.

Our concern here is not with the science of Heyerdahl’s expedition—that would be for people who are far more learned and entrenched in that field of study. Nor is it the expedition itself, though it was pretty impressive. What struck the authors of this book was the incredible swell of popularity around Kon-Tiki and the celebrity of Heyerdahl and his crew years after the expedition: the drama of it. The courage. The foolhardiness. Whatever side you are on, there is something about man against the elements and fueled by his own beliefs that we are naturally drawn to.

KON-TIKI. THE NAME ALONE still conjures an idea. A story. A movie.

But while we can get behind a story about a man and his dream—stepping out into the unknown—there is a different kind of story that we think Kon-Tiki drew Americans to: escape.

In Tiki cinema, we find men who feel themselves to be misunderstood, besieged or put-upon by modern society, so they seek a life that is more thrilling and adventurous and less encumbered by domestic and artificial hinderances.

Many are men who have been in war, have seen the darker side of their fellow men, who have lived on the edge of death.

Others simply live under the rules, responsibilities and traditional mores of modern society but now hear a calling to a dream place of drums and dancing, of passion and forbidden love, of desire and danger.

Still others are treasure seekers, people who have tasted the so-called normal lives that are expected of them and crave something more: hidden treasure. Plunder. Not just gold but the wealth of knowledge of free living under their own flag. On an island where they themselves are kings.

His Majesty O’Keefe publicity still. Warner Bros.

And then there are just the kids, those teens of the mid-century. These movies have all of the upside of the themes listed above with none of the conditions or the consequences. They just want to have fun. To them, the world is an eternal beach party. Where they are young forever. The music is good. And Frankie and Annette still rule the scene.

Whatever your stripe, there’s a reason why Heyerdahl’s story—either the bestselling book, the Academy Award–winning documentary from 1951, the documentary TV series, the modern feature undertaking in 2012 or even the museum in Oslo—appeals to us so much.

We see ourselves in it.

Yes—we see ourselves as the underdog in a story about survival as well as people who have been burdened by the weight of and adherence to the accepted beliefs of the world. These are men who answered a call to adventure—literally an ad in a Norwegian newspaper—and heeded that call. They risked death and ruin. But they found fame and freedom because they said yes.

And isn’t that the lure? The power of yes—of possibility—in a society of conformity, of normalcy, of no. We would argue that as freeing as technology and a modern understanding of the world has become, that sense of no has also grown more formidable and its grip more inescapable. We have more power to say yes—but often we are discouraged from doing so. And this makes us long for escape even more. That’s why Heyerdahl’s story of the Kon-Tiki expedition resonates and endures.

WE ALL WANT TO say yes. We all want to strike out. We all want an adventure. We all want to be masters of our own destinies, have certain futures in a world of mounting uncertainty and, in the end, dance to the beat of our own tribal drums.

It’s a theme repeated again and again: Cary Grant in Father Goose; Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity; John Wayne, Lee Marvin and Jack Warden in Donovan’s Reef; Herbert Lom in Mysterious Island.

They are all us—either who we are secretly, who we wish we were or who we want to be.

In some ways then, perhaps Heyerdahl was right. He certainly could tell a compelling story. And while we may not all be descendants of the Incas, there is strong evidence to support that wherever we are from, whatever our category, wherever our port of call, we are all navigating our way through life with whatever we have around us.

Father Goose lobby card. Universal.

We are all Tiki People. And these stories are our touchstones.

May we always keep them close.

Mahalo!

1

TIKI GOES TO WAR

SOUTH PACIFIC AND THE WORLD WAR II EXPERIENCE

The war was a nightmare. The war was a dream.

Again and again these two sides to the same coin—how