I wish I had been to a Tiki bar before I stopped drinking. I am aware exotica has a taint of cultural appropriation, yet I am fascinated by the aesthetic of America’s obsession in the 50’s with the south Pacific.
1954’s Hell’s Half Acre has the curious distinction of being a noir which was filmed on location in Hawaii. There is still some rear projection and rooms that, if they weren’t sets, might as well have been. But it largely uses real environments that look great on screen. Sure, it may be odd to see Don the Beachcomber listed as technical advisor, but Republic Pictures got what they paid for, even if it is surprising this budget studio could afford it.
Too bad there isn’t a strong enough story to be worthy of this photography. When it opens, Wendell Corey is at his club, attending a surprise honorary banquet being held for him. He’s there with Nancy Gates, until she follows Robert Costa out the door, after receiving a note from him instructing Corey to permanently leave the area on a plane “in exactly seventeen hours”. That seemed strangely specific.
If he doesn’t leave or give him 100 grand, Costa will turn over the police a complete history of Corey’s legacy of crime. Instead, Gates opts for a fourth option and shoots the attempted blackmailer in the head. I was quite surprised to see a bullet hole in somebody’s forehead in a movie of this vintage.
Corey’s criminal background is likely quite lengthy, as he used to be the head of a crime syndicate. What I didn’t fully understand is whether Corey is still running it. This is especially strange because, whether or not he is still the kingpin of organized crime on the island, he is also apparently a composer. If he doing this today, maybe he would be a gangsta rapper who truly lives the thug life, however unlikely it is to imagine Corey doing that.
Back on the mainland, Evelyn Keyes hears a record of his “Polynesian Rhapsody” which, alas, does not sound like “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the style of traditional Hawaiian music. It sounds like Corey’s voice reading the trite poetry over it, the kind of the dreck Rod McKuen used to write.
We hear that same song in that scene with Corey, Gates and Costa back in Hawaii. Something I can’t wrap my brain around is we also hear somebody, possibly Corey, reading that poetry, though we don’t see who is delivering this. Corey definitely isn’t, unless we’re hearing what is in his head. And it sounds exactly like what was on the record, which makes it seem they somehow recorded his inner monologue and…ahhh, I’m thinking too much about this.
Anywho, Corey takes the rap for Gates’s murder of Costa. He also instructs her to get a large sum of money from his safe and use that to hire a particular attorney in San Francisco, only she never makes it there because she is killed by Philip Ahn, who is Corey’s right-hand man in this organization which I’m still uncertain is now a legitimate or criminal enterprise.
Parallel to this, Keyes has arrived on the island, because the record convinces her Corey is her husband who supposedly died in Pearl Harbor, only now has a different name. He keeps denying this and he also has a large burn scar on his right cheek, unlike how her husband appeared in a photo we saw earlier. Whomever is, or was, her husband, she was only with him for three days, but that resulted in a son who is now eleven years old. When Keyes tells Corey how much the lad looks like him, I was wondering if she would feel compelled to severely burn the right side of the boy’s face, just to ensure they continue to look the same.
This is a movie with enough plot for at least two pictures, yet it keeps coming back to this “is he/isn’t he” business, which becomes quite tiring. Never mind the other plot threads I didn’t go into, such as Corey fleeing the authorities to find the man who killed Gates. Then there’s how Keyes even connects with the fugitive Corey, which involves a whole series of ridiculous contrivances.
One of those involves becoming a taxi dancer, and her connections to doing so are through a taxi driver played by Elsa Lanchester. Having watched enough of this type of cinema, and read plenty of books about it, is obvious Lanchester’s character is coded as gay, something which always surprises me to see in films of this vintage. I was also surprised by the strong suggestion the “pay to dance” work is really a front for prostitution, with the manager of the place telling Keyes, “Whatever you make on the side…tips, that is, are all yours.” Later, Jesse White will try to rape her, with her screams being what finally brings her and Corey together. I’d say that if his alleged ex could find this fugitive from justice, then the next person to show up with probably be his student loan officer.
The most deeply preposterous element of the script has the police, headed by chief Keye Luke, finding Corey but, instead of taking him back in, allow him to find the killer on his own. It was at this point my wife exclaimed, “Leave the policing to the criminals!” Luke even chastises himself for doing his job, saying, “I just get to thinking like a cop.” Well, dude, that’s because you are a cop—and one who comes up with bad ideas like using Keyes for bait to draw out the murderer.
If there is one thing in the movie’s favor, it is that it is not only shot on location, but in places the public normally would not see. A lengthy sequence towards the end takes place in slums I’m sure the tourists never saw. One character gets shot to death in the open sewers of Honolulu, which may not look like the sewers of Viena, but still reinforces how much this is yet another movie that wants to channel The Third Man. An odd score that is almost exclusively guitar even seems to resemble the zither score from that earlier film.
Alas, location does not equate to cultural accuracy. Things weren’t looking promising from the opening credits, which are in that faux-“Asian” font I find strangely insulting. Still, there are Asians cast in most of the roles which are native islanders, even if they may be Chinese or Japanese. But there is still some yellowface, such as the obviously Caucasian Gates trying to pass for a local, or Leonard Strong’s seedy dealer of underworld information. There appears to be some debate whether Strong had any Asian ancestry, but he doesn’t look he does, and his performance is all the more unusual in that he tries so hard to channel Peter Lorre, a European.
If daylit noir is a curious subgenre of noir, Hell’s Half Acre goes one step further by being in a location in which I cannot think of another film of that category was made. But it seems odd the shoestring-budget Republic went to all the trouble to film on location when the script is so weak. It is a movie focused on too many things, and too frequently on the wrong ones. Characters talk almost entirely in slightly awkward dialogue such as “go back to that..castle of your dreams, or whatever it is. Don’t mess around in other people’s dirty laundry.” Much like the mix of locations in which it was shot, this is an odd mix of the beautiful, the tawdry and the deeply artificial.
Dir: John H. Auer
Starring Wendell Corey, Evelyn Keyes, Elsa Lanchester
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXIV