Pineapple Pap

Hollywood has never had much luck with pineapples, and neither has Charlton Heston. He planted his first crop in Diamond Head, but all that came up was a lot of white imperialism. Heston missed the pulpy movie extract of James Michener's novel Hawaii, but he is back to brandish his riding crop in the in-florescent sequel, The Hawaiians.

The film picks up where Hawaii left off; Whip Hoxworth (this time played by Heston) returns home to find that his dead grandfather has willed him 85,000 measly acres of Hawaiian soil. Hoxworth promptly heads for French Guiana to steal some pineapples to plant. A lovely Chinese girl (Tina Chen) helps the fruit to flourish, and Hoxworth soon has most of the island on the Dole.

The plot is laced with the usual colonial tensions and pretensions: Hoxworth feuds with a polyglut of races while his pineapple princess (Geraldine Chaplin) goes quietly mad. Every time the pace slackens, which is often, someone goes to sea, either to pick up field hands or to transport lepers to Molokai. The incessant ebb and flow is intended as a metaphor for the turbulent tides of Hawaiian life. But the real metaphor here is the pineapple, which in the good old gangster days was a synonym for bomb.

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