“The brash and the lyrical are polarised in the rhythms of this melodrama in which Raoul Walsh's familiar conflict of choice is centered on a female character, played with spirit and conviction by Jane Russell, a floozie who quits the mainland to make her fortune in Hawaii as a ‘hostess,' but who loses her man in the process. In Walsh's hands, Scope and DeLuxe Color become the perfect tools for the modulation and interiority of this ambiguous narrative.” --Edinburgh Film Festival.
“As the adventuress par excellence (Mamie Stover) is impelled to test and transgress the Law in the same way that all Walsh's (male) heroes do.... But as the film reveals,...(h)er drive is...to transgress the forms of representation governing the classic cinema itself, which imprison her forever within an image....” --Pam Cook/Claire Johnston, in “Raoul Walsh,” an Edinburgh Film Festival '74 Publication