The Hawaiians (film)
| The Hawaiians | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Tom Gries |
| Produced by | Walter Mirisch |
| Written by |
James Michener (novel) James R. Webb |
| Starring |
Charlton Heston Tina Chen Geraldine Chaplin Mako |
| Music by | Henry Mancini |
| Cinematography |
Lucien Ballard Philip H. Lathrop |
| Edited by | Ralph E. Winters Byron W. Brandt |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | United Artists |
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Release date
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17 June 1970 |
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Running time
|
134 min. |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $2.3 million (US/ Canada rentals) |
The Hawaiians, released in the UK as Master of the Islands, is a 1970 American historical film based on the novel Hawaii by James A. Michener. It was directed by Tom Gries with a screenplay by James R. Webb. The cast included Charlton Heston as Whipple Hoxworth and Geraldine Chaplin. The performance by Tina Chen led to a Golden Globe nomination as best supporting actress.
The film was based on the book's later chapters, which covered the arrival of the Chinese and Japanese and the growth of the plantations. The third chapter of the book had been made into a film, Hawaii, in 1966.
The story begins forty years after the events depicted in the original Hawaii, as a new generation of Americans and Asians must deal with a changing island and world; one of them is a sea captain.
Whipple "Whip" Hoxworth (Charlton Heston) returns home to Hawaii to find his grandfather has died and left his fortune to Hoxworth's cousin, Micah Hale (Alec McCowen). Hoxworth, the black sheep of his otherwise very conservative and disapproving family, starts a plantation, staffing it with newly arrived Chinese indentured servants Mun Ki (Mako) and his second wife/concubine Nyuk Tsin (Tina Chen).
Mun Ki fathers children with Nyuk Tsin, all the while dreaming of returning to China and his first and officially "real" wife. Nyuk Tsin has other ideas. For the remainder of the story she is referred to as "Wu Chow's Auntie" (Wu Chow being their firstborn son) to support the traditional fiction that Mun Ki's official spouse in China is the "real" mother of his children.
Whip steals valuable pineapples from French Guiana in the hope that they will grow in Hawaii. He gives the forlorn plants to Wu Chow's Auntie, knowing that she has a "green thumb". When she succeeds in nurturing the plants into flourishing, the overjoyed Whip offers to buy her some land as a reward. Over Mun Ki's opposition, she accepts. This is the first step in the rise of both Whip and Wu Chow's Auntie, as well as of the pineapple industry in Hawaii.
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