Robert Flaherty was to have co-directed but he bowed out, leaving MGM "action" director W. S. Van Dyke on location in the South Seas to film this story of white man's corruption of the island paradise, based on Frederick O'Brien's account of his travels. Some of the sequences retain the Flaherty "touch" to be sure. Stunning location photography in the Marquesa Islands complements a genuinely effective melodrama. Monte Blue gives a tremendous performance as a drunken doctor who finds happiness with a native woman, then meets his demise when he refuses to stoop to the level of the genocidal colonizers. In its poetry and its politics, it appealed to the Surrealists. "Ado Kyrou echoed their feelings when he wrote of it as 'one of the most beautiful poems about love we have been given to see,' and of 'the magnetic beauty of this flood of love' and of 'this miracle that plunges us into total wonder'" (Georges Sadoul).