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

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.

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 adaptation of Somerset Maugham's sordid tale about an alluring woman who gets progressively judged and berated and then lusted upon by a Christian missionary is less about moral hypocrisy and more about Evolution since, from the moment Rita Hayworth lands on a Samoan island full of marines, the biggest and toughest jarhead in Aldo Ray has her number, and won't let go...

None of his underlings, not even a more muscular Charles Bronson, harmonica-playing Henry Slate or goofball Rudy Bond has a chance; and most of MISS SADIE THOMPSON seems like PR for the noticeably-aged Rita Hayworth to still be a relevant sex symbol... for a young male audience...

And she looks great despite overacting the 'good time girl' routine, singing her lines while speaking her songs. But that experienced countenance neatly blends into a free-spirited yet enigmatic character that hypocritical bible-belting Jose Ferrer realizes could have been a prostitute, forcing our marooned goddess in bright red (intentionally contrasting with the grainy-dull browns and greens for what was originally 3D) into a sudden guilty change of conscience. And this 11th hour melancholy-Hayworth, although turning in a far more subtle, natural performance, is but a means to an extremely rushed ending: Instead of building a hate/love/lust relationship between leads Hayworth and Ferrer, the latter simply frowns then screams and then explodes, leading back to that rushed romance with Ray, an infatuation as equally empty and hollow - but on HER terms.

Imagine Pat Robertson pointing his boney crazy fingers out of the screen at you and you've got the picture.

Just saw this at the World 3-D Film Expo and it was quite enjoyable. The movie has great depth and wasn't filmed in a really gimmicky 3-D style. The transitions between location and sound stage work was fairly seamless and there were scenes I really wasn't certain if they were shot in Hollywood or the South Pacific.

It's always interesting to stumble on old movies like these that resonate more than 50 years later. How much and how little has changed when it comes to religious zealots...hhmmm?