WARNING: SPOILERS

This played at SIFF’s recent Noir Fest, and I went mostly for two guys, Philip Ahn and Keye Luke, the mentors to David Carradine’s Kwai Chang Caine on TV’s “Kung Fu.” I remember when I lived in Taiwan in 1987-88, and a group of us, white Americans all, mused about how we first encountered anything Chinese. The children’s book “The Five Chinese Brothers” was probably my first contact, but “Kung Fu” was a close second. That show meant a lot to me, so I wanted to check out their earlier work. But of course they're not in it much—Keye Luke in particular.

“Hell’s Half Acre” is part of its own subgenre, Tiki-Noir, film noir set in some Polynesian locale. It was made by the notoriously cheap Republic Pictures, but they did film it on location in Honolulu. A free trip to Hawaii was apparently how they attracted the talent. 

The real talent, though, is behind the camera. I’d seen some of the other festival noirs, B movies from the late ’40s and early ’50s,  and the camerawork was mostly static, recalling episodic television of the era. This one recalls “The Third Man.” Beforehand, I’d looked up the director, John H. Auer, and nothing in his CV leapt out at me, so afterwards I did the same with the cinematographer—a guy named John L. Russell. He did a lot of TV in the 1950s and ’60s: “The Virginian,” “McHale’s Navy,” “Wagon Train,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”... 

And what, per IMDb, was he known for?

“Psycho.”

Holy shit. 

He also photographed Orson Welles’ “Macbeth” and was the camera operator on “Touch of Evil.” Welles said he was the best camera operator he’d ever seen.

It’s a shame this movie didn’t use his talents in service of a better script.

All over the place
For a movie that mostly stays in Honolulu, and mostly within its red-light district, the titular “Hell’s Half Acre,” the story is kind of all over the place. I don’t know if I can even describe it properly.

A racketeer and his girl, Chet Chester and Sally Lee (Wendell Corey and Nancy Gates), attend a red-carpet affair at a Honolulu nightclub, where a spoken-word song that he wrote is performed. Mid-song, Sally pulls a small note from Chet’s … collar? I don’t even know. It’s rolled-up, like a message between eighth-grade girls, but it’s a threat from the Hawaiian gangster sitting across the club. He doesn't even know it's there, and Sally, rather than telling him about it, confronts the gangster alone. When he’s unwilling to bargain she guns him down with a bullet to the forehead. This is still that bloodless age of Hollywood gun action so a bullet to the head felt shocking. Once he finds about it all, Chet decides to take the fall for the murder.

Meanwhile, in the states, Donna Williams (Evelyn Keyes) is listening to the spoken-word song at a record store—I guess it was sweeping the nation—and some of the lyrics are the exact same words her wartime husband Randy Williams wrote on a framed photo for her before he shipped out to the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor. He was presumed KIA but could he still be alive? Is Chet Chester really Randy Williams? That would mean he actually chose the name Chet Chester, which is a stretch in itself, but she flies to Honolulu to find out.

The first person she meets is a lady cabdriver, Lida O’Reilly (Elsa Lanchester, of “Bride of…” fame), a former schoolteacher from Wisconsin who sounds British, and who came to Hawaii decades earlier and never left. She never leaves Donna, either. She drives her to the police station, where the agreeable Chief Dan (Keye Luke) agrees to let Donna see Chet the next day; and then she drives her to Chet’s old place, where Sally is living. Except a strange man, Roger Kong (Philip Ahn), tells her Sally in unavailable. We know why. He killed her. He was trying to get at Chet’s racketeering money and got too violent.

The next morning, before the tete-a-tete with Donna, the cops have Chet ID Sally’s body. A heretofore model prisoner, Chet breaks free to solve the crime himself. So now Donna can't ID him. But wait, lady cabdriver has an idea! (Yes, she's still hanging around.) She tells Donna that Chet is probably hiding out in Hell’s Half Acre, and what if Donna became a taxi dancer there? It would be a good way to question people!

Then it gets really confusing. Roger Kong spots Donna, and though she’s the one person who can ID him at the scene of crime, he doesn’t have her killed. He has her drugged—though, oddly, we don’t see that part. We just see her waking up naked beneath the sheets in the apartment of Rose and Tubby Otis (Marie Windsor and Jesse White, the future Maytag repairman). Kong is cuckolding Tubby, who’s a lush, and who tries to rape Donna. But Chet Chester (in a nearby room?) overhears, bursts in, decks him, and takes Donna to a different room … which looks like the exact same room. 

Better off
Meanwhile, people keep dying. Roger kills Ippy (Leonard Strong), an informant, while the “Hawaii 5-0”-like cops plug Tubby after chasing him near some “Third Man”-like sewers. Chet initially denies he’s Donna’s one-time husband but no, he is Randy. After Pearl Harbor he got involved in the rackets, as one does, and though there’s a son now, age 11, the kid is better off thinking his father died heroically in war rather than being burdened with the current version of him. So Chet/Randy claims. Then he concocts a heroic death for himself in this movie. He agrees to get killed by Roger Kong so the police can bust Roger Kong. Instead, the police kill Roger Kong in front of a “Make Hawaii Safe” sign.

None of it makes sense. Roger Kong kills everyone he doesn’t need to and leaves alive the one person he should’ve killed. And what musk is Chet Chester giving off? One woman kills for him, another searches the world for him. She becomes a taxi dancer to find him. No offense to Wendell Corey, who played the accountant in “I Walk Alone,” but I’m not seeing it. 

But the cinematography is great.