Femmina ribelle

Shot partially on location in Hawaii and at the Twentieth Century Fox studios in Los Angeles in 1956, this film recreates the atmosphere of the islands before and during the Second World War. Because of her Amazonian good looks and the notorious publicity associated with "The Outlaw" few critics have given Jane Russell her due as a dramatic actress. In this film, directed expertly by the old-hand Raoul Walsh, she plays a no-nonsense out-on-her-luck prostitute –-here disguised in the usual Hollywood manner as a dance hall hostess—who falls for the rich guy on the hill. Unlike the other sex-goddesses of her time, foremost of all Marilyn Monroe who had been offered the part and turned it down, Jane shows none of that little-girl innocence and vulnerability of her sexy competitors; here she is as tough as nails, a big tomboy with a great body who knows exactly what she has and what it's worth. All business. Particularly memorable is a heated scene with Richard Egan in which she explains why she is obsessed with making money. It is probably one of the most convincing portrayals of a hooker without a heart of gold in film.

This one came out when my cinema-going was pretty well supervised by my parents who, had they known the subject matter, would not have approved of my going to see it. So it wasn't until years later that I caught it on a TV broadcast. I'd missed the credit titles but it wasn't long before I recognized the distinctive style of the musical scorer, the incredibly prolific Hugo Friedhofer. Check out his credits on the IMDb site dedicated to him and you'll be amazed at the number of projects on which he worked, both credited and uncredited. This movie focussed on a love story with a fairly heavy emphasis on its sexual aspect, discreetly cleaned up for the presumably conservative audiences of the mid-Fifties. But Hugo's music leaves no doubt as to what's going on but isn't being graphically depicted. Twentieth produced and released a lot of product around that time that took full advantage of CinemaScope and color, as well as their own system of multi-track stereophonic sound. With the locations used for this one, it would be a treat to see a theatrical presentation of this film, despite its flaws. It's a genuine artifact of what the movie moguls foisted on the adult audiences of the day. And besides Jane Russell in a role especially tailored to her, ahem!, talents, it's got Agnes Moorehead, who always added a special frisson to every role she played.

Good Hawaiian locations, a strong performance by the gorgeous Jane Russell and a very sexy Agnes Moorehead - how could you want more? But there is also glorious colour and cinemascope, a pretty good recreation of the attack on Pearl Harbour, and Michael Pate as the baddie.

Sadly Richard Egan is dull as Russell's love interest and the whole film is ruined by a rushed and meaningless ending. I guess no-one really believed the film's feminist ideas.

Raoul Walsh directs Jane Russell in an adaptation of William Bradford Huie's sexy novel about a brunette bombshell of ill-repute who leaves San Francisco for Honolulu in 1941 and falls into successful career as a dance-hall hostess. The heroine, mercenary and not above some cunning ruthlessness, is an interesting creation, and Russell does her justice. While her wisecracks and general air of condescension are unlikely ingredients for a woman who makes her fortune as a quasi-prostitute, Russell has the hard, salty armor for a role like this. Playing star-crossed lovers with wealthy novelist Richard Egan, Jane is nearly all business, and her witticisms are a hoot. Unfortunately, 1956 was too early for Hollywood to begin revealing the layers of the wanton female mind, and the picture seems too timid, too clean and luxurious as a result. Strictly as a big studio soaper, it has its pleasures. **1/2 from ****

Rather like her one-time co-star Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, it seemed to me, was often put to work in racy movies requiring her to be sexy and regularly disrobe. So it is here in Raoul Walsh's lurid melodrama set in Honolulu right at the time of the Pearl Harbour attack by the Japanese.

How her title character got there is via San Francisco where her thinly-disguised call-girl activities attract a police ban and set her on a boat trip to Hawaii, on board which she encounters fellow-passenger Richard Egan, a successful writer. They have a fling and Egan's Jim Blair lends her some money until she gets started. Soon afterwards he learns she's effectively a prostitute and she that he's engaged raptor another woman,

As their relationship ebbs and flows, the bombing takes place unsurprisingly causing a major panic and the film ends up with one of those cop-out endings which looks suspiciously like it was dreamed up in response to exit-cards handed out to preview audiences.

Russell has to pretty much carry the whole film by herself and is rarely off screen. Indeed director Walsh sets the up the whole movie in the first shot when he sets her up walking away from the camera before abruptly turning around and facing down the viewer. She gets strong support from a blonde Agnes Moorhead as the brothel's tough-minded madam and Michael Pate as Moorhead's sadistic enforcer, just as happy bullying women as knocking out non-paying clients. I also thought that Egan did well in a tricky part as the principled writer-turned-soldier torn between his attraction for his clean-living society girl-friend and Russell's more carnal charms.

For me the story took a lot of believing and I had an especially hard time accepting the depicted durability of Russell and Egan's affair, but filmed in rich Deluxe colour and making good use of location shooting, this almost proto-feminist movie on adult subject matter, for all its compromises within its storyline and characters, was another of those contemporary Hollywood films pushing the envelope right under the censor's nose.