A Descarada

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.

If The Revolt Of Mamie Stover had been done at Columbia Pictures Harry Cohn would have made this the big budget film of the year and had Rita Hayworth doing it. As it was 20th Century Fox had Susan Hayward under contract and I'll bet this was offered to her first.

With her tresses a flaming Arlene Dahl red, Jane Russell plays the title role in this film. She's a working girl who's been kicked out of San Francisco for her notoriety. But Jane's heard of job opportunities in Honolulu working in another den of iniquity run by Agnes Moorehead with Michael Pate as her enforcer. She also meets on the tramp freighter she's traveling on Richard Egan with whom it's on and off for the next few years from before World War II and after.

Jane's smart about money though and she saved her's and invested it in picking up cheap real estate from people leaving Hawaii after Pearl Harbor. She's rich post war, but hardly respectable.

It's what she craves most, respectability as she tells Egan about her white trash background from Mississippi. Funny that Russell doesn't have the slightest trace of southern accent or even attempts one.

Russell is good in the title role, but the plot really doesn't go anywhere. I can't begin to fathom what Richard Egan's character is all about the script is unintelligible where he's concerned. And the story has a sudden death ending that leaves you hanging.

Not her best film, but it does have some nice Hawaiian numbers one of which Bing Crosby recorded for a Hawaiian album he did, Keep Your Eyes On The Hands.

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.

At the time,the master of melodrama was Douglas Sirk;a film noir master,Walsh is not as talented as far as melodrama is concerned ;his movie looks sometimes like a poor man's "from here to eternity" .

The permanent features and the name of the game of melodrama are respected:Russell portrays the bad gal who got a raw deal when she was a child,rejected by the right-thinking ;and this is familiar ,she becomes a formidable ruthless (who said "war profiteer"?) businesswoman !from "only yesterday" in the early thirties to "imitation and life" or "writtn on the wind" ,the girl who is through with love makes a lot of money or becomes a big star.

Richard Egan is a curious choice for the lead,being too cerebral,too earnest for such an empty part but Mrs Moorehead steals every scene she is in ;it is one of her rare parts where she shows herself coquette. Melodrama buffs can have a look.

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.