"King of the Coral Sea" starring Chips Rafferty and Rod Taylor was shot entirely on location at the top end of Australia and has an open-air, robust quality. From the opening shot of Chips controlling the rudder of the pearling schooner with a couple of ropes, like driving Ben Hur's chariot, the film is full of fascinating detail.

Ted King (Chips) and his crew are in the pearl shell business on Thursday Island. When they discover a floating body, the authorities ask them to investigate a people smuggling racket. This triggers the plot and is the catalyst for the action at the end as Chips takes out the smugglers "Deliverance" style with a speargun.

The underwater scenes featured a special diving helmet used by the pearl shell divers, which filled with water if you fell or leaned too far forward; it was more dangerous than wrestling a giant squid.

As Stephen Vagg observed in his biography of Rod Taylor, Chips at 6'5" towered over 5'7" Rod who plays American Jake Janeiro. But look at the shoulders on Rod, he was actually wider than Chips and looked tough and cocky. He was billed after Charles Tingwell who is cool and smooth as the playboy owner of the pearling business, but you sense Rod's self-assurance, he was on his way, even if his American accent wasn't quite cooked yet.

Beautiful Ilma Adey who plays Chip's daughter is intriguing. According to IMDb, it was her first film, her only other credits were for an episode of "Home and Away" and a documentary about Australian films. There's little about her online except a piece about her as a showgirl at the Celebrity Club in Sydney around 1950. How did she escape films?

Reg Lye as Grundy mugs and leers like an old-time music-hall villain. A touch of subtlety could have made a better performance.

Chips and director Lee Robinson didn't bother with studios, they planted their camera and actors right where they wanted to tell their story. Anyone who enjoyed this outing should catch "Walk into Paradise", where they went even further north to New Guinea.

I give King of the Coral Sea a ten score because the love and passion by all concerned in the making of this little gem shows through on the screen. 25,000 pounds was a minuscule budget for a film even by 1953 standards, certainly Hollywood would spend that on the trailer alone. Chips Rafferty produced this film, and put nearly all of his own money into it, in fact most of what he earned he invested back into the Australian film industry in the days when no one else was much interested in it, he never became a rich man, but he did become an Australian icon of the screen, Hedda Hopper once called him, Australia's Gary Cooper, the laconic 6'5" Chips was always a commanding presence on screen. King of The Coral Sea may not have the flashy Hollywood production values of a huge budget, but it does have an endearing charm that has only increased as time goes by. Noted also as the screen debut of 23 year old Rod Taylor, ironically playing a phony yank, that he would later parlay into a big Hollywood career, Charles Tingwell was also offered a Hollywood contract that he turned down in favour of going to England where he forged a successful career, returning to Australia for good in the 1970's, he once proudly showed me a ledger listing the profits that King of the Coral Sea made, a film everybody involved with was justly proud, beautifully filmed on Queensland's Thursday Island, and underwater scenes at Green Island off the coast of Cairns. A nice crisp print of this film on DVD is available from Australia's National Film and Sound Archive shop online at http://shop.nfsa.gov.au/