Take a full-blown soap opera and add scenery to die for . . . statehood brings changes to the islands, and a major problem for the hereditary Howland empire, all of which involve (gasp) multiracialism. Fear not, the conflicts find a traditional, Production Code- approved resolution. Charlton Heston strains to humanize a role that plays like Big Boss Bigot, and everybody else just tries to stay afloat: Yvette Mimieux, George Chakiris, James Darren. The big thrill is finally being able to see the show in its full Panavision proportions.

Diamond Head
Blu-ray
Viavision [Imprint] # 272
1962 / Color / 2:35 widescreen /107 min. / Street Date November 29, 2023 / Available from [Imprint] / au 39.95
Starring: Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux, George Chakiris, France Nuyen, James Darren, Aline MacMahon, Elizabeth Allen, Vaughn Taylor, Marc Marno, Philip Ahn, Harold Fong, Edward Mallory, Richard Loo.
Cinematography: Sam Leavitt
Production Designer: Malcolm Brown
Costume Design: Pat Barto
Film Editor: William A. Lyon
Original Music: Johnny Williams
Title theme composed by Hugo Winterhalter
Screenplay by Marguerite Roberts based on the novel by Peter Gilman
Produced by Jerry Bresler
Directed by Guy Green

The guilty reason for reviewing the so-so glamour soap Diamond Head is one we almost don’t want to admit: it’s a Charlton Heston film that precedes Major Dundee, with the same producer, cinematographer and editor. By 1960 Heston was calling the shots on his movies, even at Columbia, where he was fulfilling contractual commitments made years before. Heston’s clout was such that he could entreat the producer of his next picture tear down giant sets of ancient Rome and replace them with a Chinese city for 55 Days at Peking. When Nicholas Ray was too sick to apply himself to production, Heston brought the director of Diamond Head to Spain to film new scenes.

Diamond Head is an awkward picture. Charlton Heston knew that a sustained career couldn’t depend on giant Biblical epics. He kept going with westerns and TV work in between suspense thrillers and even a semi-comedy. But sober films about jut-jawed, hard-headed he-man prevailed. Diamond Head is essentially a Big Ranch western, minus action & gunfights, and centering almost completely on race prejudice. The title itself could describe Heston’s character, an unrepentant Haole bigot. The man owns most of an island and tries to bend everybody else to his will.

Richard ‘King’ Howland rules the roost in his pineapple & beef empire, on land owned by his family for generations. He has a sprawling mansion with beautiful grounds, a stable of beautiful horses, and an airplane to fly over to Honolulu as needed. A hands-on business manager, King is willing to tear himself away for public office. With Hawaii now a state, Judge Blanding and party politician Bob Parsons (Vaughn Taylor & Edward Mallory) feel that the popular King is a shoo-in for senator.

Too bad that the Howland family politics are such a volatile mess. King’s younger sister Sloane (Yvette Mimieux) and local pure-blood Hawaiian boy Paul Kahana (James Darren) went together to college in San Francisco; now they return with the unwelcome news that they are lovers and are going to get married.  ↑  King forbids the relationship: he wants his family empire to remain pure white. He says he owes that to his heritage — his own young son, his wife and both his parents died in a plane crash years ago. King’s sister-in-law Laura (Elizabeth Allen) came to live with King, but no romance followed, and now her prime function seems to be reinforcing King’s bigotry.

King’s essential hypocrisy threatens to cost him everything. His own kept woman, Mai Chen (France Nuyen), has just become pregnant.  ↑  King refuses to acknowledge the baby, unaware that Mai Chen’s brother Bobby (Marc Marno) takes the money King gives her. He now decides that King’s senate run make it time for a blackmail payoff. A violent death makes the whole scandal into public knowledge.

Added to the mix is Paul Kahana’s older brother Dean, a respected doctor (George Chakiris). Dean resisted the allure of Sloane in the past, and now senses something about Sloane’s relationship with her older brother is unhealthy. Unlike Paul, Dean is a half-blood. Both Dean and his mother Kapiolani (Aline MacMahon)  ↓  have grave misgivings about Paul & Sloane being together — not because multiracialism is bad, but because of bigots like King and Laura.

The first novel of Honolulu newsman Peter Gilman, Diamond Head was described as a mix of James Michener and Peyton Place. The film adaptation reportedly makesh some character adjustments and a LOT of incidental changes. Some of them sound like suggestions from the Production Code office. The book may also incorporate a volcanic eruption into the storyline.

Screenplay credit goes to the respected Marguerite Roberts, a serious blacklist victim whose name was removed from films like Ivanhoe. Much later, she returned with the unanimously praised True Grit. We don’t know the politics, but producer Jerry Bresler did not encourage edgy filmmaking, and in fact openly stated that he tailored his films to eliminate material that might offend a censor. In the novel it is (apparently) Sloane who becomes pregnant. She marries Paul’s brother to make the child legitimate — and presumably the future Howland heir.

Diamond Head looks good and is reasonably well-directed, but the screenplay is the kind of racist whitewash that by 1960 should have been extinct. The main question — should races and colors mix — is debated, but the film refuses to take absolute sides. Diamond acknowledges that King Howland is a hard-headed jerk, but being obstinate and unreasonable is not a bad thing for All-American movie heroes. The killing and suffering precipitated by King Howland’s stance are just (sigh) sad things that can’t be avoided.

The fact is that Hawaii is a small piece of real estate. A few white families own most of the land and control the money and the jobs, and most everyone else is utterly powerless. The ‘wise woman of color’ Kapiolani Kahana just simmers in sadness. The educated, ethical Dr. Dean tells King he’s wrong, but also sits back and lets bad things play out.

The dramatic opposition is worked out in utterly predictable ways. Charlton Heston’s BIG SCENE is somehow supposed to show King changing his entire world-viewpoint. How?  He runs his favorite white horse wild through the rough, exhausts himself, and stares in anguish at his empire which will now surely fall into non-white ownership. King has driven away everybody he thought he could control, and ruined his political fortunes to boot. He and his horse come back muddy but newly-minted as ‘accepting’ of biracialism — but all we can see is that he doesn’t want to be abandoned. If it’s that easy to cure ingrained bigotry, why didn’t Bobby Kennedy just trick George Wallace into taking long horse rides?

The truth is that even with nods toward Civil Rights attitudes, Hollywood persisted in kowtowing to an unwritten, obscene principle, miscegenation. The word itself is no longer acceptable. When white heroes fell in love with ‘Indian maidens,’ Asians and South Seas ‘dusky dames’ the answer was always the same — somebody has to get killed so that blood lines can remain separate. The original Bird of Paradise struck the template — no matter how good and beautiful the biracial couple may be, it must be kept apart, even if somebody has to jump into a volcano. The attitude never went away in American films, because Hollywood didn’t want to offend the notorious censors of the Southern market. The 1950 Western hit Broken Arrow follows the format of Bird of Paradise, which seals the fate of its ‘Indian princess’ that dares love a white man.

Diamond Head has two multiracial relationships — No Waiting!  Its sensitive and progressive resolution for the conflict confects for both of the non-white partners to die. A major issue is that the twin tragedies will have a bad effect on King’s political prospects. The political king makers wanted Howland because he could deliver the ‘native’ vote. But they also don’t want the power of the state to filter down to the island’s non-white citizens. Would they have rejected King Howland’s candidacy, if he married Mei Chen and accepted his Hawaiian brother-in-law?  Had King been born 60 years later, being a hypocrite accused of murder and hiding an Asian mistress would be considered a political asset in some circles.

France Nuyen had made a stunning debut in a stereotypically similar role, in the musical South Pacific. Written after the war, its ‘progressive’ wrinkle is that the white lover dies, not the Polynesian girl. In Diamond Head Mei Chen suffers the old-fashioned penalty; the fact that King Howland has an ephiphany in the film’s last few seconds can’t make things better. But both stories are accepting of biracial children. Is that a significant step forward?  George Stevens’ Giant was released a full six years before, and spells out the ugly truth — bigotry and prejudice intensify generation by generation. It ends with a giant close-up of American babies, Anglo and Latino.

In 1960 there was no such thing as sensitivity to the casting of races and ethnicities. Greek and Italian- Americans George Chakiris and James Darren are dark and handsome, but not very Hawaiian. Although she performs well and carries a great deal of personal warmth, Aline MacMahon now looks out of place as a traditional Hawaiian mother. With locations filmed in Hawaii, the assembled Howland employees are an authentic group of Hawaiians, Asians and Polynesians. But the big party scene was likely filmed on a Hollywood sound stage, with local talent. The dancers look like professionals and all the guests are brightly dressed and squeaky-clean. When James Darren and Yvette Mimieux take center stage to do some showoff engagement dancing, all of the ‘dark’ women laugh and clap in approval. It also looks as if France Nuyen and Aline MacMahon stayed in Hollywood. We don’t see them on exterior sets.

The casting isn’t bad — Yvette Mimieux was secured from MGM because Heston liked her in Light in the Piazza. George Chakiris also seems an outside hire. But James Darren was a Columbia regular. Producer Bresler would hire from lists of actors who owed movies to the company, like Heston himself. For Diamond Head and Major Dundee Heston was paid an amount contracted back in the middle 1950s, before he was established as a star in epics.

The thankless role goes to Elizabeth Allen ↗  , who would turn around and play exceedingly well in John Ford’s broad comedy Donovan’s Reef. Allen’s priggish, underwritten Laura expresses sadness that she’s wasted years hanging aroung King. We still wouldn’t call her time wasted — living in Hawaii was pretty incredible in 1959, even if your family didn’t own half an island.

The IMDB says the big ranch was filmed on Kauai, but mention is made of the locals going to Hilo, indicating a different Hawaiian island as the locale for the Howland empire. The selected locations make the islands seem an unspoiled paradise. Sloane’s red jaguar looks like a dream on those clean roads. When it needs a tune-up, I guess she ships it back to England.

I once heard it described that half of post-war Oahu was military-claimed, and ‘economic interests’ were patiently waiting for an opportunity to pave over the other half. A more complicated view of the choices open to the heirs of Hawaii’s hereditary white landowners is presented in Alexander Payne’s 2011 The Descendants.

Viavision [Imprint]’s Blu-ray of Diamond Head is a handsome, colorful encoding of Columbia’s 1962 release, which is said to have performed decently at the box office. It’s shot in Panavision and Eastmancolor; the Pathécolor holds up reasonably well. The location is attractive, without too many ‘beauty shots’ being stuck in our faces. Two editorial observances … a shot of foggy mountain peak was is re-used twice in the movie, and looks like a mistake. Also curious is an insert of Elizabeth Allen in an early dialogue scene, an attempt to match the island location with Allen standing in front of a painted backdrop. It doesn’t look good at all . . . was it necessary to change or add dialogue?

The disc has no extras.

What did we learn from finally seeing Diamond Head?  As the producer, Jerry Bresler must take the rap for letting the storyline devolve into an insensitive, obvious talking-head soap. The finished film ‘tells it like it is’ on race issues with attitudes several decades old; it eventually ducks the entire subject with a positive gesture that won’t change a thing. The bottom line is that beloved ‘dark’ people are apparently best appreciated when they’re dead, like good old Gunga Din.

The show has some scenes with odd resemblances to Major Dundee. Heston shacks up with a Mexican woman and swims with another in an idyllic pond. Most interesting is a dream sequence. Sloane Howland dreams that she swims with the three men in her life, switching between the faces of Paul, Dean and her own brother.  ↑  It’s a dead ringer for a dream cut from Dundee, where Heston’s lovers become interchangeable. The writers of Peckinpah’s movie cribbed from 101 earlier movies — did they tap this one as well?

As coincidence would have it, Charlton Heston played a much more likeable Haole with a non-white girlfriend in The Hawaiians (1970), the sequel to the much bigger Road Show release Hawaii (1966). His romance with Tina Chen is less exploitative than this one with France Nuyen, but the visual iconography isn’t much different.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Diamond Head
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good + / –
Video: Very Good
Sound: Very Good
Supplements: none.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: December 16, 2023
(7047diam)

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