"Hell's Half Acre" Review

 

by Daniel White

1. Evelyn Keyes

2. Elsa Lanchester

3. Marie Windsor

Those are three of the best reasons to watch Hell's Half Acre (1954). That it's also a gritty, ballsy, punchy little crime caper doesn't hurt. In fact, this better-than-average film noir has a lot going for it.

What it doesn't have going for it is a robust leading man. Instead, it features the anemic, underwhelming, Wendell Corey. What this flick desperately needs to make it a home run hitter is a brooding Robert Ryan or a menacing Jack Palance in the role. At least with our three screen queens, it manages to get to third base.

Directed by John H. Auer on location in Hawaii (smart decision by producer Herbert Yates), the film tells two tales about Chet Chester (Corey). A less-than-scrupulous business man who has made a bundle of money in the Hawaiian islands, he's In love and hoping to turn respectable. However, his former partners refuse to let Chet just walk away. The second story about our malnourished male star concerns his possible former wife, Donna Williams (Keyes). Living in San Francisco, she discovers that her husband, Randy Williams, may still be alive. Thought to have died at Pearl Harbor, Randy has reinvented himself as, you guessed it, Chet Chester.

Donna takes off for Honolulu and soon finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery. Hiring lady taxi driver Lida O'Reilly (a fabulous Elsa Lanchester) as her guide, the gutsy, game Donna is determined to ferret out the truth about Chet/Randy. It's a grainy, grubby walk on the seedy side, and when that trampy tall sip of Mai Tai, Marie Windsor, shows up, we are in B movie paradise.

Throw in Jesse White as Windsor's pathetic little freak of a lap dog (his attempted rape of Keyes is an especially cinematic low point in sordidness) and Keye Luke as an indefatigable police detective, and you are in a film noir fanatic's dream (nightmare?) world. That's exactly what Hell's Half Acre is - heaven, for people like myself, who love the sort of nasty, naughty antics unfolding in this feral flick.

Released through Republic Pictures, with John L. Russell of Psycho fame handling the cinematography, Nancy Gates as Corey's doomed love interest, and Philip Ahn as the principal heavy, Hell's Half Acre is available on YouTube. If only Bob Ryan had been free... Robert Stack? I'd settle for Jeff Chandler, anyone but Wendell "dull as dishwater" Corey.