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

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.

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.

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.

This is the 1950's "Disney-ized" version of W. Somerset Maugham's wonderful story "Rain," which was filmed much more successfully and faithfully with Joan Crawford as Sadie back in 1932.

Rita Hayworth is always a pleasure to watch--a true beauty with significant talent, though her performance here isn't much to shout about. Probably due to the wretched script and mediocre direction.

This Technicolor, 3-D (in the original theatrical release), musical version demonstrates clearly that technology does not equal quality.

The worst element of this version is perhaps Jose Ferrer as the unbending moralizer who tries to convert Sadie. Certainly he's supposed to be stiff, but not to the point where his face shows absolutely no nuance of emotion ever.

Look for a studly young Charles Bronson in a minor role, listed in the credits as Charles Buchinsky (this must have been before he discovered that Hollywood didn't like ethnic--especially in the 50's).

No, your best bet is just to read the story. Maugham deserves the attention; he's a much under-rated writer.