Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Hell's Half Acre Blu-ray Movie Review

Bargain real estate in Honolulu is so hard to find.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 1, 2013

According to the frequently unreliable Wikipedia, there are in fact several places called Hell’s Half Acre scattered throughout the United States, though the titular area of this 1954 quasi-noir isn’t among them. Honolulu might seem like an unusual setting for a tenement, with its glistening high rises, pearl white beaches and copious displays of wealth. But as anyone who has visited another glamorous oceanside metropolis—namely Rio de Janeiro—can tell you, there are shantytowns in the most unlikely of places. Hell’s Half Acre has a couple of interesting elements despite never quite gelling as either a compelling drama or as a “real” film noir, chief among them its post World War II Honolulu locale. Hawaii is often seen as some sort of exalted paradise, but in the unseemly world of Hell’s Half Acre it’s home to vicious criminals and lots (and lots) of scheming and duplicity. That makes for an interesting dialectic, where the surface pleasures of a gorgeous tropical location never completely mask the roiling subterfuge going on underneath. Director John H. Auer was a journeyman helmsman who is probably best remembered (if he’s remembered at all) for the film that preceded Hell’s Half Acre in his filmography, 1953’s City That Never Sleeps (due from Olive Films in just a few weeks as this review is being written), and as with that film, Hell’s Half Acre features some fairly compelling characters caught in morally ambiguous situations. Unlike The City That Never Sleeps, however, Hell’s Half Acre has a bit more courage of its noir convictions, ultimately not shirking from the sort of seedy trappings that infest several characters’ motives and actions.

At least some of Hell’s Half Acre was obviously shot on location, for there are a couple of sequences with Evelyn Keyes and Elsa Lanchester riding a skiff out in the ocean that were certainly done near Waikiki. That said, I have a hard time believing that a bargain basement studio like Republic and its impecunious producer Herbert J. Yates would have greenlit having the entire film shot there, but the fact remains that Hell’s Half Acre is a fascinating little window into at least being able to glimpse what Hawaii was like in the mid-fifties before it was a state. Of course, this film probably would never have been used by Hawaii’s nascent tourism department, as it posits a pretty unseemly assortment of characters populating the darker corners of Honolulu.

The (anti)-hero of Hell’s Half Acre is Chet Chester (Wendell Corey), a Honolulu nightclub owner whom we discover has (as with any good noir anti-hero) a shaded past. Chet has written a rather risible “song” (which includes hilariously “poetic” narration) called “Polynesian Rhapsody” which is premiered at his club one evening courtesy of a laudatory introduction by Chet’s partner Roger Kong (Philip Ahn). Chet’s girlfriend Sally Lee (Nancy Gates) notices another former partner named Novak (Robert Costa) glaring at Chet from the corner, and she soon figures out why. Novak has stashed a threatening note in Chet’s lei (isn’t that the way secret messages are always relayed in Hawaii), and when Sally follows Novak out of the club to question him about the threats, things get heated rather quickly, with Sally taking matters into her own hands courtesy of a handy pistol. Let’s just say Novak’s threats become moot, though Sally and Chet now have to deal with an inconvenient corpse. Chet insists that he take the fall, since he has enough money stashed away to hire a good defense attorney. The thing to realize about all of the preceding description is that it takes place in just the first few minutes of the film and is only a precursor to the convoluted plot that is the main storyline of the film.

The film then segues to Los Angeles where a beautiful young woman named Donna Williams is listening to a record of “Polynesian Rhapsody”. She is stunned to hear the narration use a very distinctive phrase that is inscribed on a photo she once received from her husband, a Navy man who supposedly perished on the Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The phrase is so distinctive that Donna, who has never really believed her husband is dead, decides on the spur of the moment to cancel her engagement to another man and fly off to Honolulu to investigate. Upon arriving, she’s quickly taken under the wing of a kind of batty taxi driver named Lida O’Reilly (Elsa Lanchester, playing a character supposedly from Wisconsin who still speaks with a noticeable English accent). Donna goes to the Honolulu police station and meets with Chief Dan (Keye Luke, promoted from being Charlie Chan’s number one son) and confesses her suspicions that Chet Chester may be her supposedly dead husband. Dan agrees to let her meet with the prisoner.

Before that can happen, however, the vicious Kong shows up at Sally’s house and beats her to a bloody pulp, in the process making her trip and die of a broken neck. That in turn requires Chet to go to the morgue to identify her, at which point he escapes police custody, at least temporarily putting the kibosh on any reunion with his maybe wife. That then sets the long and rather convoluted second act of the film in motion, where Chet is out to find who killed Sally while Donna is out to track down Chet. The two paths cross, of course, after Donna is more or less kidnapped by Kong and kept prisoner of two lowlifes played by the incredible couple of Jesse White and Marie Windsor.

Hell’s Half Acre works in dribs and drabs, but it’s seriously undercut by the total lack of charisma on the part of Wendell Corey, certain one of the blandest anti-heroes of any noir. Keyes is lovely (and looks rather amazingly like Beverly Garland in this film), but she’s prone to over emoting (wait until you catch her final scene where she’s supposedly talking via long distance to her young son). That leaves the heavy lifting of the film’s acting to the supporting cast, and the good news is, they’re largely superb. White and Windsor are like something out of some long lost Tennessee Williams play set in Hawaii, and Ahn is terrific as the violent Kong. Lanchester is just flat out weird, as she so often was, but she’s fun to watch and adds a little humor to an otherwise pretty turgid outing.

Hell's Half Acre Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hell's Half Acre is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. Aside from a little stock footage used for some establishing shots, the bulk of the elements here look quite good, with only very minor damage to report. Contrast is very solid throughout this presentation, especially helpful in that so much of the film takes place in shadowy environments. Gray scale is very nicely modulated and the image is decently if not overwhelmingly sharp and well detailed.

Hell's Half Acre Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hell's Half Acre features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix that sounds surprisingly full bodied for its age. The frankly hokey score, which utilizes ukeleles and pedal steel, sounds very good, especially in the midrange, as does the massed choral Hawaiian singing. Dialogue is very cleanly presented. Fidelity is very good, though the track has the expected boxy sound of a vintage mono soundtrack.

Hell's Half Acre Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are featured on this Blu-ray disc.

Hell's Half Acre Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Any film that lists Don the Beachcomber as a Technical Advisor can't be all bad, and Hell's Half Acre isn't. Of course, that doesn't automatically mean it's very good, either, and there's no denying a sort of clunky aspect to large swaths of this outing. But if you can get past the kind of omnipresent "beige" quality that Corey brings to his role, there's quite a bit to enjoy here. Chief among the pleasures is the rather outré supporting cast, including the always watchable Jesse White and Marie Windsor, who really bring the most classic noir unseemliness to this film. It's also fantastic to see Ahn and Luke in such relatively large supporting roles. This Blu-ray offers very good video and audio and with stated caveats comes Recommended.