Mamie Stover is Walsh's most important film of this decade [the fifties], revealing an emotional landscape in which he lets his guard down and creates pure vulnerability on the screen. Mamie exists in a script with potholes, and she is pulled down by the weight of the world around her. Yet she is a real woman, full bodied enough to capture the spectator with the full force of her honesty.
--Marilyn Ann Moss, Raoul Walsh (The University Press of Kentucky, 2011).
1956 was a terrific year for American movies -- John Ford's The Searchers, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, Budd Boetticher's Seven Men from Now, Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, etc.-- as the power of studios and censorship were starting to weaken. Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover, like many films of the period (including the ones I mentioned) takes a corrosive view of the myths of the American dream and class mobility. Jane Russell gets kicked out of San Francisco in 1941 and sent to Hawaii, where she goes to work as a "hostess" (code word for prostitute) at The Bungalow, run by the bitter, butch and blonde Agnes Moorehead. She and wealthy writer Richard Egan meet on the ship to Hawaii and fall in love, as he abandons his country-club girlfriend Joan Leslie. When the bombs hit Pearl Harbor Russell uses her money to buy up property cheaply and when Egan enlists in the army Russell swears to give up her hostess job. But bitter Moorehead convinces her to stay with the job, at a considerably increased commission. Egan sees cheesecake photos of Russell in the army and when he is injured he returns to Hawaii to confront Russell, where she fails to convince him of the importance of money to her, who grew up without it.
Walsh and Russell create a strong and assertive presence of a woman wanting to find her own way in the world, helped by an intelligent script by Sidney Boehm (who wrote Fritz Lang's The Big Heat in 1953), vivid color cinematography by Leo Tover and a vibrant score by Hugo Friedhofer.
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