Miss Sadie Thompson

The old Sadie Thompson story gets the full Technicolor treatment and some eye-filling location photography of a beautiful South Seas island--but nothing hides the fact that the story is simply another reworking of the Somerset Maugham saga about a sinner, a man of the cloth and a bunch of rowdy U.S. Marines.

RITA HAYWORTH gives her all to put some much needed vitality into the tale and puts some heat into her dance number--"The Heat Is On"--while the men aren't shy about showing how they appreciate her earthy charms. But there's not much to say about the story and its labored message about sin and redemption with JOSE FERRER as the uptight preacher who takes a moral stand on her behavior but can't practice what he preaches.

ALDO RAY and CHARLES BRONSON are among the Sadie admirers in uniform and both of them do splendid jobs. Rita has a nice chemistry in all her scenes with Aldo Ray but her scenes with Ferrer never quite have the impact they're supposed to. She handles all the dramatic moments well, but there's a tired look about her face that is most noticeable during the latter half of the film.

Not exactly an upbeat tale, but Rita does make a believable Sadie Thompson.

After reading other reviews- wow. It's not that bad. Yes, the story has been done, but Hayworth makes it well worth watching.

And the theme underlying the story is still relevant. Sadie Thompson is a woman of questionable repute, living on a South Sea island trying to re-make her life.The Jose Ferrer character is effectively odious. A man hung up on projecting his moral issues on the nearest target. This happens to be Miss Sadie.

I recall seeing this film on an TV afternoon movie festival, when I was very young. I enjoyed it. Maybe if we were less jaded we would find the story more enjoyable. This was made in 1953, and the morality issues then are still present today.

The sets are beautiful. This was filmed on the sparsely populated Hawaiian island, Kuaui. Overall even if you are not a major Hayworth fan, the story has redeeming aspects. I will have to watch "Rain" again with Joan Crawford to compare, but it is so dated, this film is worth a look.8/10

Having read some of the comments about this film I must disagree with much of the criticism made against this film. I have seen the 1932 Joan Crawford film "Rain", and while I agree that it is more successful in creating the mood and tone which is required for the story I consider this film version to have its own virtues. Rita Hayworth is good as Sadie (although unlike Joan Crawford she presents herself most of the time a a happy go lucky sort whereas with Crawford it is always apparent that she has a "bad" past)and Jose Ferrer is solid as Mr. Davidson. The location and Photography also add a great deal to the telling of this simple yet powerful story.

Rita Hayworth hardly fit Somerset Maugham's physical description of Miss Sadie Thompson in his short story on which the film is based.

"She was twenty-seven perhaps, plump, and in a coarse fashion pretty. She wore a white dress and a large white hat. Her fat calves in white cotton stockings bulged over the tops of long white boots in glace kid".

However she captured the spirit of the character and I think the film does do justice to Maugham's story. It was updated to the 1950's and opened out with the introduction of other characters - Aldo Ray and his U.S. Marine buddies - but the conflict between the missionary and the bar girl thrown together in Pago-Pago when their ship is quarantined still has bite.

I first saw this film in the late 50's and thought it was pretty powerful - you didn't hear words like 'prostitute' bandied around too often in movies back then.

José Ferrer ate up the role of Mr Davidson, the missionary who sets himself up as the anti-fun police and attempts to save Sadie's soul whether she wanted it saved or not - all the while suppressing a dark side.

Aldo Ray was good as O'Hara, the tough marine sergeant who also wants to save Sadie from her previous life. The marines seemed a little over-caricaturised. It wouldn't have come as a surprise if they'd broken into a chorus of "There's Nothing Like a Dame".

But this film is Rita Hayworth's. Catching the brashness of Sadie, she showed her range; very different to the soft-voiced femme fatale she often played. She sings and dances with stocky Aldo Ray, and is still a luminous presence. According to Peter Ford's biography of his father, "Glenn Ford: A Life", Rita desperately wanted Glenn to play O'Hara and go to Hawaii with her. This was at a time when she was beginning to show signs of the problems that would blight the rest of her life - Glenn Ford always provided an emotional safety net for her.

This film looks good and the story of barely repressed lust with its shock ending still stands up. And of course, a film such as "Miss Sadie Thompson" takes on another dimension knowing the course of the lives of the fascinating people who made it.

On an isolated South Pacific island, the unexpected arrival of Sadie Thompson (Rita Hayworth) causes an uproar among the local men at the US Marine Corps base, as well as with visiting philanthropist and religious zealot Alfred Davidson (Jose Ferrer). Sadie quickly strikes up a relationship with Marine Sgt. O'Hara (Aldo Ray), but the increasingly-offended Davidson will stop at nothing to see Miss Thompson and her wicked ways escorted off of the island.

Previously filmed in 1928 with Gloria Swanson and in 1932 with Joan Crawford, this version is heavily censored due to the production code, although it still manages to be mildly racy for the time. I really wasn't liking Rita Hayworth in this, but gradually I began to accept her take on the Thompson character. She's played as not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, a good-time girl in over her head and barely able to take care of herself. She gets to sing several songs, only she's dubbed, and the syncing is terrible.

Aldo Ray is his usual big lug/gorilla, while Ferrer gets to be self-righteous and bombastic. Charles Bronson gets a little more to do than usual at this stage of his career, playing one of the other Marines, but it's still not much, and he's still billed as Buchinsky (but at least he even got a credit this time). This was shot in 3-D, and played very briefly that way, but it flopped, so a flat version was widely released. The movie received an Oscar nomination for Best Song ("Blue Pacific Blues")