Plot
A boy and girl are shipwrecked on an uninhabited tropical island. With no adults to guide them the two make a simple life together unaware that sexual maturity will eventually intervene.

Release Year: 1980

Rating: 5.3/10 (20,344 voted)

Director: Randal Kleiser

Stars: Brooke Shields, Christopher Atkins, Leo McKern

Storyline
On a journey to San Francisco, Richard, his father and cousin Emmeline find themselves on a ship about to explode. Rushed to a lifeboat with Paddy Button, the two children escape while their father (and uncle) are on another lifeboat. In the chaos following, the lifeboats are separated. Paddy, Richard and Emmeline find themselves with no food and no water stuck in the middle of nowhere. After some time, the three come across an uncharted paradise, where Paddy quickly teaches the children fishing, hunting and building. After maybe a month or two, Paddy gets very drunk off a barrel of rum found on the island when they first arrive, and drowns in the middle of the night. Emmeline and Richard, now alone and very scared, move location and rebuild their island home. Many years later, the two young teenagers have developed a very real home, but hormones and feelings between the two strain their friendship...

Writers: Henry De Vere Stacpoole, Douglas Day Stewart

Cast:
Brooke Shields - Emmeline
Christopher Atkins - Richard
Leo McKern - Paddy Button
William Daniels - Arthur Lestrange
Elva Josephson - Young Emmeline
Glenn Kohan - Young Richard
Alan Hopgood - Captain
Gus Mercurio - Officer
Jeffrey Kleiser - Lookout (as Jeffrey Means)
Bradley Pryce - Little Paddy
Chad Timmerman - Infant Paddy
Gert Jacoby - Sailor
Alex Hamilton - Sailor
Richard Evanson - Sailor

Taglines: Two children shipwrecked alone on a tropical island. Nature is kind. They thrive on the bounty of jungle and lagoon. The boy grows tall. The girl beautiful. They swim naked over coral reefs. They run in a cathedral of trees. And the warm winds, the tropic moon, the silk sand conspire to enchant them. When their love happens, it is natural as the sea, and as powerful. Love as nature intended to be.

Release Date: 5 July 1980

Filming Locations: Nanuya Levu Island, Fiji

Box Office Details

Budget: $4,500,000 (estimated)

Gross: $58,853,106 (USA)

Runtime: 104 min

Trivia:
Because of the belief that the "heroic man is supposed to be taller than the woman", Brooke Shields spent much of this movie walking in trenches dug into the beach. This was due to the fact that, despite being only 14 (compared to Christopher Atkins' 18 years), Brooke Shields was already 5'10", dwarfing Chris Atkins height of 5'6". Years later, they would appear on an awards show, this time she standing her full adult height of 6', prompting his comment of "it's like having the 'Statue of Liberty' standing beside me".

Goofs:
Plot holes: Being stranded on an island for years, neither Richard nor Emmeline show any signs of tanning or sunburning.

Quotes:
[first lines]
Young Emmeline: Richard, don't go out too far.
Young Richard: Em's a fraidy cat!
Arthur Lestrange: Richard! Emmeline! Come back here! This minute! And be careful!

THIS IS NOT BAD ACTING!! Please remember this...

Rating: 8/10

After reading all the critiques and reviews, there's just one thing that all of you have to remember: THE ACTORS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE PORTRAYING TEENS WITH THE SOCIAL MENTALITY OF 7 OR 8 YEAR OLDS. Many critics were saying that the dialogue and the acting was bad, but in actuality, the acting is very good for what the plot called for. Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins were supposed to portray young adults who were 'cut off' from the rest of the world at a very young age. That's why they were supposed to portray two people with the limited education, mentality, vocabulary and speech of 7 or 8 year olds. It would really have been unrealistic if they had more developed dialogue, since they had nobody to further their speech skills on an island with only two people...who were still both mentally children! That is why they show scenes where they sing very incomplete songs, refer to San Francisco as "Sanfarisco", and forget their daily prayers.

In light of all this, I think they did a very good job of acting and the writers did a very decent job of limiting the dialogue to the speech abilities of young children.

However, there are some unbelievable and unexplained scenes, such as the giving birth scene. How do they cut the umbilical chord off?? And some other minor details should have been explained, but overall: A very beautiful and romantic story with a happy ending.

An 8 out of 10.

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