only asset is seeing the buxom Jane Russell in CinemaScope.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A revolting melodrama that’s as phony as falsies. It has the distinction
of being a trashy but respectable film. The Production Code tamed William
Bradford Huie’s naughty novel in which the film was based, and it was written
in a listless style by Sydney Boehm. The filmmakers sanitized things by
making the heroine a materialistic dance hall hostess instead of a prostitute,
as she was in the novel. The result is a flat romantic drama, whose only
asset is seeing the buxom Jane Russell in CinemaScope. The part was originally
intended for Marilyn Monroe, but she turned it down. Director Raoul Walsh
(”High Sierra”/”Esther and the King”/”The Big Trail) doesn’t help matters
by keeping things predictable, dull and absurd.
In 1941 bad girl dance hall hostess Mamie Stover (Jane Russell) is
escorted by a San Francisco policeman to a freighter bound for Honolulu
and tells the dancer/singer she’s not wanted in this town (why this is
so, is never explained). The only other passenger onboard is wealthy novelist
Jim Blair (Richard Egan), who is returning home to his Honolulu hilltop
luxury home. The two chat and Mamie lets the high-minded writer know that
she’s a poor gal from backwater Leesburg, Mississippi, who aspires to become
a millionaire, find love and get some respect.
Mamie gets hired by the pragmatic owner of The Bungalow, Bertha Parchman
(Agnes Moorehead), to work in the dance hall that caters to military personal
who buy a ticket to dance with the babes and are hustled for drinks. Harry
Adkins (Michael Pate) is the sadistic manager and club enforcer of the
house rules: hostesses are forbidden to have boyfriends on the “outside,”
and are not permitted to go to Waikiki Beach or have a bank account.
Jim’s lady friend is the docile fellow wealthy heiress hilltop resident
Anna lee (Joan Leslie) and Jim’s obedient manservant is Aki (Leon Lontok),
who resents Mamie because he feels she doesn’t belong in her boss’s elite
company. But Jim is not thinking with his head and romances Mamie. She
dyes her hair red and becomes the star attraction at the club that soon
changes its name to the “Flaming Mamie.”
After Pearl Harbor, Mamie has saved enough bread to buy real estate
at bargain basement prices from those businessmen fleeing in panic from
the island. Jim enlists in the army, and promises to marry Mamie after
the war if she quits her dance hall gig. But Bertha offers her a partnership
and the money is too good to refuse. When Jim learns that Mamie can’t be
trusted to keep her word he dumps her, and a despondent Mamie leaves town
to return home to Mississippi. While stopping over in San Francisco, Mamie’s
informed by the same policeman from before that she is not welcome (the
cop we can assume has nothing else to do but wait around the docks to tell
a bad girl like Mamie she’s not wanted in such a clean living town). After
Mamie tells him that she is just passing through on her way home, he comments
that she looks like she “didn’t do so good in Hawaii.” When Mamie counters
would he believe that she made a fortune and gave it away, he just shakes
his head. Well, that’s exactly my reaction.
Jane sings “Keep Your Eyes On the Hands,” the film’s signature song.