What makes it different from others?

Instant Favorite.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

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

Director: John H. Auer, Story by Steve Fisher, Cinematography by John L. Russell with a surprisingly great cast, Wendell Corey, Evelyn Keyes, Marie Windsor, Jesse White, Nancy Gates, Keye Luke, Phililip Ahn, Robert Costa, Leonard Strong, and Elsa Lanchester. The film takes place in for that time period the Hawaiian Territory. Hell's Half Acre is to Honolulu what Bunker Hill was to Los Angeles, the ghetto district of Honolulu, a multi-story labyrinth, a rats nest of cribs, flop houses, clubs, gambling dens and dime a dance joints. I wonder if this film along with Cry Vengeance & Alaska Seas were a way of priming the territories for statehood as in "see your just as corrupt as the rest of U.S.". Story opens with a couple planning to be married, Chet and Sally Lee (Wendell Corey and Nancy Gates), sitting in Chet's tiki nightclub "Chet's Hawaiian Retreat" the ultimate Tiki Bar. Chet Chester has a burn scar on the left side of his face, he is something of a racketeer, at the start of WWII he started a syndicate in Hell's Half Acre with "Slim" Novak (Robert Costa) and Roger Kong (Phililip Ahn), then after the war he bought them both out and went legit. Now he pretty much has gained some pull and respectability Honolulu. He has enough leisure time on his hands to also compose and record songs. Chet's friend Roger Kong is throwing a party in his honor by staging a Hawaiian band & chorus floor show playing Chet's hit song "Polynesian Rhapsody" While they listen, sinister looking Novak passes a threatening note to Sally Lee who excuses herself to meet him in the clubs office. He tells her that he is going to blackmail Chet exposing his past so he and Roger can re start the syndicate. Sally, taking no BS from Novak, puts a bullet in his forehead, in a surprisingly pretty graphic sequence for 1954. Sally Lee goes back and tells Chet what she did. He tells her that he will take the rap for her but that she is to leave for the mainland with $50,000 of his money to give to a lawyer buddy of his back in LA to get him off. Cut to a record store in LA. Donna Williams (Keyes) is sitting mesmerized listing to "Polynesian Rhapsody" at the end however, she is startled by the final line "you're my golden dream at the rainbows end". She buys the record and runs home, the final line is exactly the same as an inscription her dead sailor husband wrote to her on a framed picture she has on a table. It can't be a coincidence, and she is still holding the torch for Randy who was on the USS Arizona when it was bombed at Pearl Harbor. Could he be alive, She wants to talk to the composer. So she flies to Hawaii to check things out. So beings an interesting convoluted story of murder, shady characters, and the Hawaiian underworld. The film has a very entertaining cast of supporting players Keyes is very cute in this masquerading as a taxi dancer at one point, waking up naked in a bed at another, Marie Windsor is also great and equally good looking as sort of a Femme Fatale, and Elsa Lanchester is a blousy woman cab driver. Jessi White plays Windsor's alcoholic husband and Ahn is Windsor's Chinese lover. Don the Beachcomber was the technical adviser for the film the inventor of the Tiki Bar.Wasn't expecting much but was pleasantly surprised. Some nice noir-ish sequences, but not a lot of them. Available on DVD from Olive. 8/10

It's almost mandatory that when you film in Hawaii you film in color. But that would have put Herbert J. Yates and Republic Pictures on the horns of a dilemma. They were making a noir film set in Honolulu which is most often done in black and white anyway. And Yates was trying mightily to keep his studio afloat with the advent of television which overtaking Republic's bread and butter, B westerns.Evelyn Keyes and Wendell Corey star in this film where Evelyn hears that the husband she thought lost on the Arizona in December of 1941 is on trial for murder in Honolulu. She goes to Hawaii to investigate. Corey the long lost husband is now a syndicate big shot and has confessed to killing a former partner. A third partner Philip Ahn is looking to take advantage of the situation and inherit all of Corey's assets.No sooner does Keyes arrive in Hawaii than she's hip deep in the case when she tries to visit Corey's current girlfriend Nancy Gates. She spots Ahn near the home where he has just recently murdered Gates. That puts both Corey on a personal hunt and the Honolulu PD on a hunt for Ahn.I have to say that while Ahn has played villains before, he was never quite as brutal as he is in this film. His opposite number Keye Luke plays Honolulu's chief of police and he's a wise and compassionate soul and really in the end comes through for Keyes. Corey also does the decent thing in the end.A couple of other interesting roles are Jesse White as a hapless drunken gunsill and his slattern of a wife Marie Windsor who next to Gloria Grahame played the most tramps of the Fifties.Some story plot holes that you could have driven the Arizona through when it was afloat unfortunately mar Hell's Half Acre. But the characterizations are just fine. I only wish that color had been used because having been to Hawaii black and white doesn't do it justice.

This little gem of a film noir B movie is about a woman trying to track down her long lost husband in Hawaii after the War (WWII) where he was supposed to have died. In the process she finds herself in the middle of an underworld power struggle. Beautifully filmed in Hawaii with Ms. Keyes really working those facial expressions, as she tended to do. The film is tight, cynical and at times redeeming. Just a good little film.