Island in the Sun (1957) on Netflix
On the Caribbean island of Santa Marta, British rulers and the descendants of enslaved islanders live divided. Four couples face interracial romance, politics, and murder.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb6.1/101,602 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
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Plot summary
On the small Caribbean island of Santa Marta, four couples face a society divided between British rulers and descendants of enslaved islanders. Maxwell Fleury, an insecure white plantation owner's son, is jealous of his wife Sylvia and envies his sister Jocelyn, who is courted by Euan Templeton, the governor's visiting son. David Boyeur, a young Black union leader, is courted by the governor and draws both attraction and tension from white widow Mavis Norman. Denis Archer, the governor's aide, is smitten with Margot Seaton and gets her a job in the governor's office.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Island in the Sun (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Joan Fontaine received poison pen mail, including purported threats from the Ku Klux Klan, after playing interracial love scenes with Harry Belafonte in the film; she turned the letters over to the FBI.
- Island in the Sun drew protests before its opening in St Paul-Minneapolis and was banned in Memphis, Tennessee, which called it "too frank a depiction of miscegenation, offensive to moral standards, and no good for either white or Negro." Zanuck had said he would pay the fines of any theater owners fined for showing it.
- The Barbados mansion that stood in for the Fleury estate, Bel Fontaine, at Farley Hill, was gutted by fire in the mid-1960s, and a 2009 proposal would have demolished its surviving foundations and exterior walls.
- Island in the Sun was Dorothy Dandridge's comeback film; she had not made a movie since 1954's Carmen Jones, and had turned down supporting roles in The King and I and The Lieutenant Wore Skirts on the advice of Otto Preminger, her lover and the director of Carmen Jones.
- Harry Belafonte co-wrote the title song "Island in the Sun" with Irving Burgie, and it has since been covered more than 40 times, by performers ranging from The Merrymen to José Carreras and The Righteous Brothers.
