the audience applauded

Fresh and Exciting

Did you people see the same film I saw?

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Rita Hayworth hardly fit Somerset Maugham's physical description of Miss Sadie Thompson in his short story on which the film is based."She was twenty-seven perhaps, plump, and in a coarse fashion pretty. She wore a white dress and a large white hat. Her fat calves in white cotton stockings bulged over the tops of long white boots in glace kid". However she captured the spirit of the character and I think the film does do justice to Maugham's story. It was updated to the 1950's and opened out with the introduction of other characters - Aldo Ray and his U.S. Marine buddies - but the conflict between the missionary and the bar girl thrown together in Pago-Pago when their ship is quarantined still has bite.I first saw this film in the late 50's and thought it was pretty powerful - you didn't hear words like 'prostitute' bandied around too often in movies back then.José Ferrer ate up the role of Mr Davidson, the missionary who sets himself up as the anti-fun police and attempts to save Sadie's soul whether she wanted it saved or not - all the while suppressing a dark side.Aldo Ray was good as O'Hara, the tough marine sergeant who also wants to save Sadie from her previous life. The marines seemed a little over-caricaturised. It wouldn't have come as a surprise if they'd broken into a chorus of "There's Nothing Like a Dame". But this film is Rita Hayworth's. Catching the brashness of Sadie, she showed her range; very different to the soft-voiced femme fatale she often played. She sings and dances with stocky Aldo Ray, and is still a luminous presence. According to Peter Ford's biography of his father, "Glenn Ford: A Life", Rita desperately wanted Glenn to play O'Hara and go to Hawaii with her. This was at a time when she was beginning to show signs of the problems that would blight the rest of her life - Glenn Ford always provided an emotional safety net for her. This film looks good and the story of barely repressed lust with its shock ending still stands up. And of course, a film such as "Miss Sadie Thompson" takes on another dimension knowing the course of the lives of the fascinating people who made it.

This sanitized version of W Somerset Maugham's "Rain" is an entertaining vehicle for Rita Hayworth who is every inch the star, (that she can't act is immaterial). She's a 'good-time' girl stranded on a very picturesque Pacific island during the war and labeled a prostitute by sanctimonious preacher Jose Ferrer who is also stranded when their ship is quarantined. Of course, Ferrer desires Sadie for himself and sublimates his desire by persecuting her. But in this version none of this is allowed to detract from what is a good old-fashioned entertainment with numerous musical interludes, (that Hayworth was always dubbed never stopped the studio giving her plenty of songs). Ferrer is well cast as the starchy preacher; he always acted as if he had a board up his back, and Aldo Ray almost matches Hayworth for laid-back, sexy charm.

Poor Sadie - either way she had a tough deal of things. Having never seen the movie "rain" I cannot do a comparison, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. So... taken on its own merits, this is an OK movie, not the best, not the worst. Rita glimmers and gleams like gold in a desert when she arrives, and it spoke heaps for the moral code that did exist that she was able to flick away unwanted attention in those days, apart from the one person who wrote his own code of course. The preacher man with too much power was convincing, (and his snivelling wife), doing what most people with too much power do - becoming corrupted by his own invincibility. Although it appears that a man (any man) offering the sanctuary of married life was the solution to the world's problems, or at least Sadie's, part of me was hoping that she would be able to revert to her original plan and go to New Caledonia. Why she didn't just push Davidson off the cliff when they were talking? But it might have spoiled the story! Not a bad way to spend an hour or so... beautiful colour, interesting story and I suppose a happy ending?

I have seen the Joan Crawford version of this story, called Rain, and also Gloria Swanson's version, called Sadie Thompson. They are both well worth seeing still, in spite of their age. But even the color and Rita couldn't save this one. This one just made me want to cry, all that waste. Gloria's face is so beautiful in the silent version that it takes your breath away. And Joan Crawford acted the hell out of the part when she did it. Poor Rita, she had one good musical number and that was pretty much it. There was great pathos in the two original movies, but this one was just pitiful. You want to see Mr. Davidson, the missionary? Take a look at what Walter Houston did to that part.Anyway, the scenery was beautiful and the technicolor was bright, and that's about as much as I can say for this movie.