and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Beachcomber (1954) is not the bare-faced audacity with which it has a crocodile grab hold of an elephant’s trunk so that the always lovely Glynis Johns can nurse the pachyderm back to health so that later, when the unlikely natives improbably stake her out 
onto the ground to be executed by elephant-stamping, she can be saved not by nicking the lunar eclipse bit from Haggard but by going all Androcles, nor is it the brown-face performances by Donald Pleasance and Michael ‘the true voice of Paddington’ Hordern, but the moment when drunken beachbum Robert Newton is told about an outbreak of cholera and responds: people who drink water deserve all they get….
Mark Bould 