Les bas-fonds d'Hawaï

Evelyn Keyes flies to Hawaii. According to Navy records, he was killed at the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, Wendell Corey has just been arrested by the Honolulu police for murder, and the picture in the papers looks like her husband, twelve years older and with a scar. She can't be sure, so she shows up at police chief Philip Ahn's office, only to find that Corey has fled into the city's red light district.

This might be set in Hawaii, but despite the sunlit views of the Big Island and the languid steel guitars, director John H. Auer leads us into a darkening and corrupt world that it all looks and sounds menacing, despite the low-key acting of the two leads. It's not great, but it's always interesting, with nice turns by Elsa Lanchester, Marie Wilson and Jesse White.

Hell's Half Acre is directed by John H. Auer and written by Steve Fisher. It stars Wendell Corey, Evelyn Keyes, Elsa Lanchester, Marie Windsor, Nancy Gates and Leonard Strong. Music is by R. Dale Butts and cinematography by John L. Russell.

Filmed and set in Hawaii, one could be forgiven for thinking this couldn't possibly work as a piece of film noir. In fact, the opening credit sequences lends one to think this could well be a frothy Elvis Presley type of movie - but it most assuredly isn't.

Cash or Cave in?

Story has Corey up to his neck in femme fatales, shifty criminal acquaintances and coppers. Which is not bad for a guy who was apparently killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor! The Hell's Half Acre of the tile is what is termed in the film as a shabby tenement district, this is the seedy underbelly of what we know as the paradise island. The location makes for some excellent atmospheric noir touches, with the production line abodes and the ream of wooden stairs and banisters making for a moody backdrop. At night the shadows come in to play, hanging nicely off of the alleyways and tawdry bars.

Dirty Rat!

Though a little too contrived for its own good, the many characterisations on show make the annoying itches easily scratched. From two-timing dames and thugs in need of anger management - to alcoholic slobs and batty taxi drivers, this has a roll call of colourful people drifting in and out of Hell's Half Acre. There's even some censor baiting going on, though the whiff of violent misogyny could have been less pungent.

Some serious noir credentials are found with the makers, Auer (City That Never Sleeps), Fisher (I Wake Up Screaming), Corey (The Big Knife), Keyes (The Prowler), Windsor (The Narrow Margin), Gates (Suddenly), Lanchester (The Big Clock) and Russell (Moonrise), and that's only really scratching the surface. With its distinctive setting and well controlled unfurling of noir conventions, this is well worth a look by the noir faithful. 7/10

The story is interesting. After a honeymoon of three days Wendell Corey has to break up to serve in the war and happens to Pearl Harbour, where he is almost killed but not quite, but he survives with his face damaged for life. He gets stuck on Hawaii and tries to make a life of his own there in a casbah-like nest of murky activitieds, where he gets mixed up with local rackets but also makes some local career as a singing poet. His wife back home has received news that he is reported missiing, supposed dead, in which assumed fact she lives on for years, until she hears a song of his and recognizes his words on a modern record. She goes to Hawaii to search for him while he gets deeper involved with murders and rackets and refuses to acknowledge her or his life before the war. Of course there are further complications.

Wendell Corey was never a favourite actor of mine, he was almost a disappointment to me in every film I saw him in for hisstiffness and lack of expression, but this film is saved by the story. The other actors are rather mediocre as well, but fortunately there is Elsa Lanchester as a helpful taxi driver, who actually contributes in saving the film. The local touch is also excellent, with sweet ukuleles singing and swinging all over the place and everywhere you go, and the environment is lovely and enchanting, of course. Only Wendell Corey is not, and he is only saved by the sad story of his fate.

This flat-footed, full-of-holes feature is nonetheless fascinating because of its Honolulu locale and exotic characters. Marie Windsor as Jesse White's wife and Philip Ahn's mistress? Film noir nirvana! And the Production Code vision of a hellish den of iniquity? A crisply clean framework of lumber and whitewash enclosing gambling parlors and taxi-dancehalls!

An offbeat drama with a dream-like guitar score and a strong female contingent, including hard-bitten floozy Marie Windsor. Shot in glacial black & white on location in Honolulu by cameraman John L. ('Psycho') Russell.

The script by Steve Fisher looks as if it began life set on the mean streets of New York; which would account for the unexpected presence of Elsa Lanchester as a taxi-driving Earth mother who takes Evelyn Keyes under her wing in the search for Ms Keyes' amnesiac husband Wendell Corey.