A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, May 19, 2026

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

Jane Russell in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

Cast: Jane Russell, Richard Egan, Joan Leslie, Agnes Moorehead, Jorja Curtright, Michael Pate, Richard Coogan, Alan Reed. Screenplay: Sydney Boehm, based on a novel by William Bradford Huie.  Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Mark-Lee Kirk, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler.  Music: Hugo Friedhofer. 

Loosely based on a novel that was loosely based on the memoirs of the sex worker Jean O'Hara, Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover is one of those dodges around the Production Code that kept cropping up in the 1950s. Set mostly in Honolulu before and after the Pearl Harbor attack, it's the story of a woman who parlayed her earnings as a "dance-hall hostess" into a fortune by buying up real estate when people fled the island at the start of the war and leasing it to the military. Jane Russell got the role of Mamie Stover -- which was one of O'Hara's actual pseudonyms after Marilyn Monroe, originally cast in the part, rebelled against her 20th Century Fox contract, and Rita Hayworth, Susan Hayward, and Lana Turner were considered. It's a perfect fit for Russell. The movie is nothing special, but it's directed efficiently by Walsh, and has solid action scenes during the Pearl Harbor bombing, and colorful views of Hawaiian scenery. 

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