- Directed by John H. Auer, Hell's Half Acre is an odd film noir plagued by a series of bizarre casting decisions. Its nominal protagonists, Donna Williams (Evelyn Keyes) and Chet Chester (Wendell Corey), deliver two surprisingly lifeless performances. Their primary adversary is a slick mobster named Roger Kong (Philip Ahn), whose alleged toughness is severely undermined by the fact that I recently saw him play the defendant in an episode of Perry Mason. Maximally English actress Elsa Lanchester plays a Hawaiian cab driver from Wisconsin. Leonard Strong and Nancy Gates try and fail to look Asian. The only cast members who seem completely comfortable are Marie Windsor and Jesse White as a thoroughly disreputable married couple and Keye Luke as a police chief.
- The film's plot is nearly as scatterbrained as its casting. Chet turns out to be Donna's long-lost and presumed dead husband, but it's tough to tell how well he remembers their brief three-day marriage. The two of them hide out in what is supposed to be a very rough Hawaiian neighborhood, but it never gets much sketchier than a pay-by-dance nightclub. The police are a strange combination of forgiving and incompetent as they allow Chet to escape their custody on two separate occasions as he tries to entrap Roger Kong. Chet's big plan is to get himself killed, which makes about as much sense as anything else that happens in the film. Despite its many problems, Hell's Half Acre is a rare film noir in that it is set in Hawaii, and the location filming (captured by Psycho cinematographer John L. Russell) helps things considerably. I'm not convinced there's actually a half-acre of hell to be found in O'ahu, but what do I know?
