Red-headed Jane Russell, blonde Agnes Moorehead, beautiful Hawaii in DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope ... what could go wrong? Well, plenty.
It's not surprising that the novel by William Bradford Huie would be sanitized by the Hollywood of 1956, still under the grip of the Production Code, but the degree to which it was makes this film not only less interesting, but less intelligible. Huie's book is about a prostitute who moves to Honolulu after being bounced out of San Francisco, and who gradually amasses a fortune by optimizing the efficiency with which she can service men via an assembly line technique she dubbed a "bullring." She also profits on the war by buying up real estate at cheap prices. Her "revolt" begins when she takes advantage of her increased power to violate the various articles of prohibition for prostitutes, e.g. From sunbathing on public beaches, buying a car, marrying a serviceman, and buying a house. It's an empathetic story of a woman rising in class despite the deck being stacked against her. (Huie believed in these shifts and equal opportunity, later getting involved in the Civil Rights movement and the case of Emmett Till, though it's important to note that he also believed only certain people could truly take advantage of it, and that Anglo-Saxons with their "superior intelligence" had an inherent edge.) But I digress.
Of course, Hollywood couldn't make a film about a sex worker who actually succeeded in life. Hell, it couldn't even admit to its viewers that the beautiful Jane Russell was a prostitute. Here she's simply a nightclub hostess who along with others is paid 30% of the take for entertaining men. Her life is for the most part quite glamorized, enjoying the fraternity of friends, a loving relationship (Richard Egan), and increasing bargaining power with her boss (Agnes Moorehead). There is a single scene in which she is beaten up behind closed doors for violating her boss's rules (the "revolt" in this version), but shows no physical or emotional sign of it having taken place afterwards, essentially neutering the event. We see her kissing her lover on a beach with Diamond Head in the background, and performing "Keep Your Eyes on the Hands" in the nightclub, with four Hawaiian women of color swaying their hips in the background (where they are for the whole film).
Hollywood also wanted no part about making points about class, except to lay the foundation for Mamie Stover's character motivation and concern about money, having grown up on the wrong side of the tracks with very little of it. Mamie Stover is intelligent in buying up property in the film, but the film then has no idea what to do with this subplot afterwards. She's in a position to easily walk away from her life as a prostitute, having made a small fortune, and gotten an affluent, good man to leave his girlfriend (Joan Leslie) for her. Despite the attempt of the film to tie her obsession with money to her returning to her life as a hostess, it doesn't ring true at all.
And this, of course, where the axe of the Production Code had to fall, wreaking moral judgment on her character. It seems to me that the real reason Mamie Stover behaved the way she did was because she needed to be punished for her sins per the Code. The resulting discovery by her lover and moral condemnation were frankly nauseating. She returns to San Francisco to get a little more repudiation from a police officer, on the way to returning to her home town, tail in between her legs, the fortune from her savvy real estate investments completely forgotten.
Jane Russell is as charming as ever, it's just too bad the film let her character down. Agnes Moorehead is also fabulous in every respect here, and reminded me a little of the role Barbara Stanwyck took in Walk on the Wild Side (1962). Joan Leslie was in her final film at age 31, a real shame, especially as the role was such a thankless one. Her character oddly disappears from the script without a scene of confrontation with her boyfriend when he's moved on from her. With the film's melodrama and its reenactment of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, lives suddenly being interrupted by the war, it played a little bit like a poor man's From Here to Eternity (1953).
It was interesting to read about the root of Huie's original story, which was the real life of Jean O'Hara, who after bouncing around the continental U. S. as a prostitute, was recruited to go to Hawaii to practice her trade there shortly before the war, sometimes using the alias Mamie Stover. A better use of your time might be reading O'Hara's story in her own words; her short memoir My Life as a Honolulu Prostitute is available online, and contains a damning portrayal of police beatings, official corruption, the "white slave racket," control of prostitutes with drugs, sixteen hour work days, and STD's. Quite a contrast to the film.