Once a furtive legend of playground gossip, twee survivalist romance The Blue Lagoon turns middle-aged.

Turning 40 is probably something which seemed a far-off fantasy to the two children marooned on a South Pacific island in 1980’s “The Blue Lagoon” and yet that’s where the film now finds itself. Seemingly all but forgotten in terms of pop culture now, “Grease” director Randall Kleiser’s adaptation of Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s 1908 novel – the third movie version – was huge in the 1980s and almost the stuff of legend for tweens and early teenagers due to its nudity and sexual content.

Of course, looking back on it now as an adult, especially from the vantage point of the liberally sexualised 2020s, it has all the lubricious heat of a particularly tame Mills & Boon (are they still a thing? God I’m getting old) but back when I first encountered it around the age of 13 or 14 it was a movie which had the charged impact of an erotic thunderbolt.

When a fire breaks out on their ship during a Pacific voyage to San Francisco, Emmeline (Elva Josephson, then Brooke Shields), Richard (Glenn Kohan, then Christopher Atkins) and the ship’s cook Paddy (Leo McKern) board a lifeboat but are separated from the other survivors and eventually wash up on the shore of a tropical island.  There, Paddy teaches them the skills they’ll need to survive and prosper but when Paddy dies, the two children are left to live and grow up on their own.

Despite the potentially problematic material of a coming-of-age story where two young Victorian children discover sex and sexuality without much of the rigidly enforced social framework of the time, there’s a twee innocence to “The Blue Lagoon” and great care is taken to favour an almost chaste, romantic tone, avoiding anything exploitative or sordid. This is no gritty mash-up of “Lord Of The Flies” and “Lolita” though. Indeed, given the ample scope for drama in being shipwrecked – explored more seriously in the likes of “Castaway” – this is a rather idyllic affair where the days and eventually years pass in tropical arcadian bliss.

It may seem an odd choice for Randall Kleiser, just two years on from his fifties musical smash-hit to basically create a film based on two lines from “Summer Nights” (he got friendly holding my hand, well she got friendly, down in the sa-ya-yand) but it had been a passion project for the director, a long time fan of the original novel. Brooke Shields was only 14 years old when the film was made, so all her nude scenes were performed by the film’s stunt coordinator Kathy Troutt while her co-star, being 18, performed his scenes himself. Those scenes – the source of the film’s furtive notoriety – are, in actual fact, soft-focussed and too soft to even be considered softcore.

“The Blue Lagoon” is a romance in almost every sense of the word. It’s an idealised vision of innocence, an idyllic recreation of the myth of Adam and Eve without not just the serpent but any serious peril whatsoever. Emmeline and Richard’s time on the island is largely untroubled either by the weather or the oft-mentioned but rarely glimpsed natives who live on the other side of the island. Having fashioned themselves an unfeasibly palatial home which looks more like a five-star Fijian resort hotel than the makeshift survival hut of a couple of post-pubescent teens, the pair live miraculously ailment-free lives with only a minor health scare and a complication-free pregnancy to interrupt their picturesque paradise.

Its steeped in the gender roles of not only the source novel but the time of the film’s making so it’s a little blunt in its division of labour, with Richard hunting, fishing and making the laws while Emmeline defaults to being the homemaker but its wrapped up in such a charmingly naïve and guileless way that it doesn’t really intrude too much into the simple story.

The cinematography is beautiful – and resulted in the discovery of a hitherto undiscovered species of iguana being identified thanks to a sharp-eyed herpetologist who saw the film. There’s plentiful underwater photography too, provided by veteran documentarians Ron and Valerie Taylor.

The ending, at the time, was deemed something of a cop-out having set up a more Shakespearian echo of “Romeo and Juliet” but I have to say, watching it again after all those years, what I recalled as a reassuringly happy ending is decidedly more ambiguous and its very much left up to the audience to decide what becomes of the innocent little family who find themselves unwillingly and accidentally ejected from paradise.

Something of a peaceful, pastoral guilty pleasure, “The Blue Lagoon” is a surprisingly innocent throwback made during an increasingly salacious time for movies and while it pales into insignificance today, it will live in erotic legend in the minds of an entire generation of teens of the eighties.