#TheAdmirableCrichton (1957) had rather a dissatisfying ending; but how else could one end it without including two world wars, and the concomitant societal upheavals, in the play? They hadn't even happened yet, when the play was written.
1950s audiences probably received it with a mixture of nostalgia and an unease that, half a century later, things wouldn't work out that way now.
It's even more uneasy, now that the play is over 120 years old. Fortunately for the movie, it's clearly a period piece even for 1957, let alone now. Land on an unpopulated South Seas island in the 1950s, and the major worry is that it turns out to be Bikini Atoll.
The location budget was spent in the right place, the writing is sharp, the island scenery pretty; and that a woman who can go hunting seems more modern than an aristocrat who needs a maid for everything probably says something.
By 1989, Nicole Kidman was in Dead Calm.
