Hell's Half Acre (1954)

Tiki Noir in Paradise Lost - Hell's Half Acre review by griggs

Watching Hell’s Half Acre as an introduction to “tiki-noir” is… intriguing, if not exactly essential. We’re in rain-slicked Honolulu – neon, cheap leis, seedy clubs – all framed with that familiar “exotic” gaze: hula girls, tourist traps and island backstreets rolled into one. A woman from the mainland arrives looking for her missing ex-GI husband, now tangled up in the local underworld. The mood is great; the story just shuffles from scrape to scrape rather than building to anything truly bruising.

It’s also soaked in casual, era-typical racism and exoticism – jokes, slurs, islanders treated as scenery – yet every so often the film turns, showing how white visitors and chancers exploit the place. It never really commits to a critique, but there’s a faint sense it knows how rigged the whole set-up is.

The acting’s patchy, with a couple of solid turns fighting through some very flat line readings. What I did like is the female cab driver: she ferries the heroine around Honolulu and drops little snippets of local gossip that gently steer the plot, a kind of low-key Greek chorus in an aloha shirt. Interesting curio, not lost treasure.