frbrown on Dec 17 2012, 08:14:40 PM wrote:I'm in. I like American films more than "international" ones.
Any recommendations for Hawaii?
If you like film noir,
Hell's Half Acre (Auer, 1954) is not fantastic by any means, but it's set -- and filmed -- in Hawaii. I wrote about it in 2011 during the noir challenge (pasting what I wrote below). It's not on an official list.
Ever heard Hawaiian-style suspense music? If not, this is the film where you'll find it, and yeah, it's kind of weird to hear mellow slide-guitar during a serious car chase. Since I saw an Alaskan film noir early in this challenge, I thought it only fair to watch a Hawaiian film noir, as well. This one has all sorts of problems, unfortunately. Wendell Corey is a guy with a bad past, but he's finally been trying to make good in Honolulu -- he's written a "Polynesian Rhapsody" that's apparently good enough to get recorded and sold on the mainland. Unfortunately, his bad past isn't over, when his girlfriend bites the dust. Meanwhile, a mainland woman (Evelyn Keyes) has bought the Polynesian Rhapsody record, and recognizes a line in the lyrics as one used by a man with a different name, who married her for three days 11+ years ago, just before he shipped out for Pearl Harbor and went MIA. We see very clearly from her photograph of him that he's Wendell Corey, and yet for most of the film, Corey persists in pretending that he's not the guy (because he'd be bad for her), and she just keeps testing him to try to get him to admit that he really is her husband -- it's ridiculous. The always-delightful Elsa Lanchester is inexplicably in this movie as a cab driver -- one supposedly from Wisconsin, before she came to live in Hawaii. Apparently people from Wisconsin had stiff-upper-lip British accents in this period, nothing like the ones I used to hear when I lived halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. Lanchester shares front-title screen credit with Corey and Keyes, and yet she's scarcely in the film compared to them. For a film that was supposedly shot in Honolulu, I didn't feel like the location was used to such great effect -- most scenes take place in cars, offices, apartments, and tiki bars. (Don the Beachcomber, one of the main guys responsible for the tiki bar craze in the mid-century, is actually credited as a consultant!) Nice to see lots of Asian-American actors in this film, though I believe all of the women are played by Caucasians -- maybe one of those nasty miscegenation conventions was still in effect, since at least one of the "Asian" women is supposed to be involved with Corey (so maybe she wasn't allowed to be played by someone of Asian descent?). Chinese-American actor Keye Luke plays a smart, capable police chief with NO stereotypical Charlie Chan accent (he's the one who kindly delivers "all Orientals look alike to you" quote that I chose, when Evelyn Keyes attempts to describe a suspect). The main villain (played by Korean-American Philip Ahn) is also refreshingly free of stereotypes (well, except for the "suave, suit-wearing film noir gangster" stereotype, but at least there was no fortune cookie epigram, overdone accent, or other, similar stupidity). Who knew so much action went down in tiki bars?
Choices that I can recall right off that might give you an official check (though I'm not sure if they're all FILMED there -- only SET there, for sure) are
From Here to Eternity (or any other title set in/around Pearl Harbor) and
The Descendants. Parts of
Punch-Drunk Love and
Forgetting Sarah Marshall happen in Hawaii. Or there's
Blue Hawaii, if you like Elvis...also not an official check...
double post
