Sadie Thompson (1928) on Netflix
Sadie Thompson, a prostitute, arrives at Pago Pago bound for a shipping-line job. Short of money, she falls in love with Sergeant Timothy O'Hara, and Mr. Davidson demands she repent.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.2/103,022 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes83%
Plot summary
Sadie Thompson reaches Pago Pago, the South Pacific port on the island of Tutuila, on a steamship from San Francisco. Her destination is Apia, where a shipping company has hired her, but circumstances keep her on the island and her money runs out. Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Davidson made the same voyage. Davidson, a self-professed deacon and reformer whose word carries weight with the islands' governors, takes Sadie for a prostitute. He confronts her and threatens to have the governor send her back to San Francisco, a city she left to begin again. Sergeant Timothy O'Hara, a U.S. Marine, has fallen in love with her and wants to marry her. He knows her past. He asks her to sail to Australia and wait for him until his service ends.
Cast
- Florence Midgleyas Mrs. Angus McPhail
- Sophia Artegaas Ameena
- Sofia Ortegaas Ameena
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sadie Thompson (1928)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sadie Thompson was the first film Raoul Walsh had acted in for 15 years and his last appearance before a camera; on his next picture, In Old Arizona, a jackrabbit jumped through his car windshield and he lost his right eye, ending his acting career.
- A week into shooting, Sam Goldwyn called cameraman George Barnes away from Sadie Thompson; Gloria Swanson and Raoul Walsh tried two unsatisfactory replacements, and Mary Pickford's favorite cameraman, Charles Rosher, could not match Barnes' work.
- Gloria Swanson got the rights to Rain by having Joseph Schenck pretend to buy the play for United Artists, never to be used, which brought the price down to $60,000 from $100,000; when the real plan emerged, the three authors threatened to sue.
- United Artists received a threatening two-page telegram from the MPAA signed by all its members, including Raoul Walsh's studio Fox and Will Hays himself; the signers owned several thousand movie houses, so a refusal to screen the film could have been a financial disaster.
- The Rain play had been quietly banned from being made into a film a year earlier and was on an unofficial blacklist, so Swanson and Walsh cut profanity and renamed Reverend Davidson to Mr. Davidson to avoid trouble with the censors.
- Half-finished and already way over budget, Sadie Thompson led Gloria Swanson to sell her farm at Croton-on-Hudson and offer to sell her New York penthouse as well, while Joseph Schenck worried because her first picture had also gone over budget.
- Before casting began, 17-year-old Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. wanted to audition for the role of Handsome O'Hara, but Gloria Swanson felt he was too young and not right for the part.
- Sadie Thompson was thought lost for years until, after Gloria Swanson's death in 1983, her estate found the sole known surviving print in Mary Pickford's personal archive; by then the final reel was damaged, and Kino International hired Dennis Doros to reconstruct it.
