Charlton Heston was TCM's Star of the Month some months back, and it gave me the opportunity to record several of his movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them is Diamond Head, which, having been released by Columbia, also shows up from time to time on Cinevault Classics. Recently, I watched it, and now you get the review.
After some nice widescreen and color opening credits showing the beauty of the new state of Hawaii, we cut to a shot of King Howland (Charlton Heston) riding to his large plantation house on a horse. He's met by a local judge to discuss several things, chief among them being the fact that Hawaii is now a state (the movie was released in early 1963 but set just after statehood in 1959), so it gets to send two Senators to Washington. King would be just the person to serve as Senator.
Meanwhile, there's other exposition to be done. Also waiting for King is Laura (Elizabeth Allen), who is King's sister-in-law. King's wife and young son died in a tsunami some years back. King also has a rather younger sister, Sloane (Yvette Mimieux), who is about to come back from college on the mainland. On the ship coming back with her is an old friend of the family, Paul Kahana (James Darren), a native Hawaiian whose mixed-race half-brother Dean (George Chakiris) is a doctor of some renown on the island. Paul tells King that he'd like to have a chat with King.
Indeed, Paul and Sloane have the same thing on their mind: they've fallen in love, and would like to get married. Nowadays, that wouldn't be such a big deal. But in 1959, interracial marriage (never mind that none of the actors playing Kahanas are real-life Pacific Islanders) was something that a lot more people considered scandalous. King is somewhat more progressive than a lot of whites, and while he thinks the local country club shouldn't be closed to ethnic Hawaiians, and no problem being friends with them, mixed marriage is out of the question. Laura is even more bigoted in that regard.
Of course, we eventually learn that King is being a bit of a hypocrite in this regard. Well, a lot of a hypocrite, since he's in a relationship with a Hawaiian woman himself, Mai Chen (France Nuyen, who at least is of Asian descent). King is OK with sleeping with the locals -- and even knocking them up -- but marriage, no sirree. No wonder Sloane and the Kahanas feel so much resentment. As for King, he's worried about the whole matter of race relations and how it might affect his Senate campaign.
Diamond Head is one of those soap opera type potboilers that were a thing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when movies were still trying to differentiate themselves from TV. One way to do so was with widescreen and lush settings in color, all of which Diamond Head has in spades. As for the plot? Oh dear. The plot twists get increasingly ridiculous, almost as much as Aline MacMahon playing the Kahana matriarch. She's also opposed to interracial marriage, but on the grounds that she sees it as destroying the native culture.
Ultimately, I think Diamond Head is more a product of its time, and a time that was soon to change really radically. Much like The Liberation of L.B. Jones from several years later that I blogged about a couple of months back, it comes across as wanting to be more daring and open-minded, but not really succeeding. Interesting, but certainly not great.
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