La Belle du Pacifique

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

In the post-World War II, while heading to work in New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean, the liberal and joyful Miss Sadie Thompson (Rita Hayworth) is stranded in a rainy island in the Pacific when one crewmember gets typhus and the vessel Orduna is put in quarantine. Sadie befriends a group of marines from an American outpost and is courted by Sergeant Phil O'Hara (Aldo Ray) that proposes her to move together with him to Sidney, Australia. However, the moralist and powerful Reverend Alfred Davidson (Jose Ferrer) recognizes her from the infamous Emerald Club in Honolulu and forces her to return to San Francisco where she has a past that haunts her. Nevertheless nobody can run away from himself.

I have just watched "Miss Sadie Thompson" following the recommendation of a friend of mine. Rita Hayworth is impressively wasted for a thirty-five year-old woman, but perfectly cast in the role of a woman with a disreputable past. In a certain moment after the conversion of Sadie Thompson I hated this movie and I found it awfully moralist. However the unexpected plot point is great and saves this tale of corruption of the human soul. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "A Mulher de Satã" ("The Satan's Woman")

At a postwar isolated Pacific military outpost, the men are all taken with Sadie Thompson (Rita Hayworth) who is stopping for a couple of hours in between ships. They try to hide her from the rest of the base. She becomes the toast of the club and finds that she has to stay for a week due to quarantine. The religious Mr. Davidson is the head of the Mission Board who tries to run her off the island before she catches her boat to Sydney. She doesn't want to go back San Francisco and he suspects she's on the run from the law after being in the notorious Emerald Club of Honolulu. Marine Sgt. Phil O'Hara falls for the brash show girl.

Rita Hayworth rides that boat onto the island and shows her star power. She puts on a big show in this movie. José Ferrer is a good cold foil for her. Aldo Ray is a meathead. I can only imagine if the O'Hara role is played by somebody great like Marlon Brando. The story seems to be stuck between something really juicy and a bad morality play. It's a hard-boiled romance exploitation movie. I don't know what it looks like in 3D. It's not obviously shot that way. At its core, Hayworth shows that she still has it.

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.

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")