![]() "Charlton Heston is an axiom," French critic Michel Mourlet famously wrote in Cahiers du Cinema a year before Diamond Head. You look at Heston here, in one of his less celebrated films, and you're forced to ponder how his incredible face became his destiny - was another career possible for him? Has any other man's face been quite as outrageously designed for movie imagery? Abetted by his regal bearing and authoritarian dramatics, Heston's physical presence is a unique movie principle. The second landscape is the contours of Charlton Heston's face, which bristle and flex and reflect light quite unlike those of any other human visage. The first is of course Hawaii, and the location shooting here is scrupulously gorgeous (without being cliched and postcard pretty) but also captures midcentury Hawaii - circa 1959, when it became a full-status state instead of a territory - as it was away from the tourist beaches: muddy, underdeveloped, cloudy, overgrown. Following a fight with Howland, Sloan and Dean take the child and leave, but Howland, forced to accept the fact that he will soon have a halfcaste brother-in-law, finally decides to give his son the family name.Ī big-budget, widescreen, bestseller-adapting, vacation-movie melodrama of the old school, Guy Green's Diamond Head (1963) has two landscapes to compete for our attention, both of them spectacular and at the same time strangely formidable, off-putting, and conflicted. A short time later, Mei Chen dies while giving birth to a son, but Howland refuses to accept the child, and Sloan decides to care for it. There Paul's brother, Dean, finds her in a drunken stupor and takes her to live at his mother's home. ![]() ![]() Blaming her brother for Paul's death, Sloan refuses to speak to him and goes to Honolulu. At the young couple's engagement party, Mei Chen's drunken brother attacks Howland with a knife, and Paul is accidentally stabbed to death when he intercedes. Richard "King" Howland, a ruthless and bigoted land monarch on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, is bitterly upset when his younger sister, Sloan, announces that she wants to marry a full-blooded Hawaiian, Paul Kahana, although he himself is having a clandestine affair with the native-born Mei Chen. ![]()
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