Hell's Half Acre Blu-ray Review
Bargain real estate in Honolulu is so hard to find.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 1, 2013
According to the frequently unreliable Wikipedia, there are in fact
several places called Hell's Half Acre scattered
throughout the United States, though the titular area of this 1954 quasi-
noir isn't among them. Honolulu might
seem like an unusual setting for a tenement, with its glistening high rises, pearl white beaches and copious displays of
wealth. But as anyone who has visited another glamorous oceanside metropolis—namely Rio de Janeiro—can tell you,
there are shantytowns in the most unlikely of places.
Hell's Half Acre has a couple of interesting elements
despite never quite gelling as either a compelling drama or as a "real" film
noir, chief among them its post World
War II
Honolulu locale. Hawaii is often seen as some sort of exalted paradise, but in the unseemly world of
Hell's Half
Acre it's home to vicious criminals and lots (and lots) of scheming and duplicity. That makes for an interesting
dialectic, where the surface pleasures of a gorgeous tropical location never completely mask the roiling subterfuge
going on underneath. Director John H. Auer was a journeyman helmsman who is probably best remembered (if he's
remembered at all) for the film that preceded
Hell's Half Acre in his filmography, 1953's
City That Never Sleeps (due
from Olive Films in just a few weeks as this review is being written), and as with that film,
Hell's Half Acre
features some fairly compelling characters caught in morally ambiguous situations. Unlike
The City That Never
Sleeps, however,
Hell's Half Acre has a bit more courage of its
noir convictions, ultimately not
shirking from the sort of seedy trappings that infest several characters' motives and actions.
At least
some of
Hell's Half Acre was obviously shot on location, for there are a couple of sequences with
Evelyn Keyes and Elsa Lanchester riding a skiff out in the ocean that were certainly done near Waikiki. That said, I
have a
hard time believing that a bargain basement studio like Republic and its impecunious producer Herbert J. Yates would
have
greenlit having the entire film shot there, but the fact remains that
Hell's Half Acre is a fascinating little window
into
at least being able to glimpse what Hawaii was like in the mid-fifties before it was a state. Of course, this film probably
would never have been used by Hawaii's nascent tourism department, as it posits a pretty unseemly assortment of
characters populating the darker corners of Honolulu.
The (anti)-hero of
Hell's Half Acre is Chet Chester (Wendell Corey), a Honolulu nightclub owner whom we
discover has (as with any good
noir anti-hero) a shaded past. Chet has written a rather risible "song" (which
includes hilariously "poetic" narration) called "Polynesian Rhapsody" which is premiered at his club one evening courtesy
of a laudatory introduction by Chet's partner Roger Kong (Philip Ahn). Chet's girlfriend Sally Lee (Nancy Gates) notices
another former partner named Novak (Robert Costa) glaring at Chet from the corner, and she soon figures out
why. Novak has stashed a threatening note in Chet's lei (isn't that the way secret messages are
always
relayed in Hawaii), and when Sally follows Novak out of the club to question him about the threats, things get heated
rather quickly, with Sally taking matters into her own hands courtesy of a handy pistol. Let's just say Novak's threats
become moot, though Sally and Chet now have to deal with an inconvenient corpse. Chet insists that he take the fall,
since he has enough money stashed away to hire a good defense attorney. The thing to realize about all of the
preceding description is that it takes place in just the first few minutes of the film and is only a precursor to the
convoluted plot that is the
main storyline of the film.
The film then segues to Los Angeles where a beautiful young woman named Donna Williams is listening to a record of
"Polynesian Rhapsody". She is stunned to hear the narration use a very distinctive phrase that is inscribed on a photo
she once received from her husband, a Navy man who supposedly perished on the Arizona during the attack on Pearl
Harbor. The phrase is
so distinctive that Donna, who has never
really believed her husband is dead,
decides on the spur of the moment to cancel her engagement to another man and fly off to Honolulu to investigate.
Upon arriving, she's quickly taken under the wing of a kind of batty taxi driver named Lida O'Reilly (Elsa Lanchester,
playing a character supposedly from Wisconsin who still speaks with a noticeable English accent). Donna goes to the
Honolulu police station and meets with Chief Dan (Keye Luke, promoted from being Charlie Chan's number one son) and
confesses her suspicions that Chet Chester may be her supposedly dead husband. Dan agrees to let her meet with
the prisoner.
Before
that can happen, however, the vicious Kong shows up at Sally's house and beats her to a bloody pulp, in
the process making her trip and die of a broken neck. That in turn requires Chet to go to the morgue to identify her, at
which point he escapes police custody, at least temporarily putting the kibosh on any reunion with his maybe wife. That
then sets the long and rather convoluted second act of the film in motion, where Chet is out to find who killed Sally
while Donna is out to track down Chet. The two paths cross, of course, after Donna is more or less kidnapped by Kong
and kept prisoner of two lowlifes played by the incredible couple of Jesse White and Marie Windsor.
Hell's Half Acre works in dribs and drabs, but it's seriously undercut by the total lack of charisma on the part of
Wendell Corey, certain one of the
blandest anti-heroes of any
noir. Keyes is lovely (and looks rather
amazingly like Beverly Garland in this film), but she's prone to over emoting (wait until you catch her final scene where
she's supposedly talking via long distance to her young son). That leaves the heavy lifting of the film's acting to the
supporting cast, and the good news is, they're largely superb. White and Windsor are like something out of some long
lost Tennessee Williams play set in Hawaii, and Ahn is terrific as the violent Kong. Lanchester is just flat out weird, as
she so often was, but she's fun to watch and adds a little humor to an otherwise pretty turgid outing.
