The Hawaiians

The Hawaiians, released in the UK as Master of the Islands, is a 1970 United States historical epic based on the 1959 novel Hawaii by James A. Michener. Starring Charlton Heston at the head of an ensemble cast, the two and one-half hour saga was directed by Tom Gries from a screenplay by James R. Webb. Tina Chen received a Golden Globe best supporting actress nomination. The film was based on the book's later chapters, which covered the arrival of Chinese and Japanese laborers and the growth of the plantations. The third chapter of the book had been made into the film Hawaii in 1966. Plot Forty years after the events in the film Hawaii, sea captain Whip Hoxworth returns to Oahu with the Corinthian’s hold full of Chinese laborers. Determined to leave the helm and run the family shipping fleet from shore, he instead learns that his grandfather (Captain Rafer Hoxworth) has died and left his fortune to Hoxworth's cousin Malama and her stoic, reproachful husband, Micah Hale. Whip, considered the black sheep of his pious and conservative family, doesn’t even get the ship, just a barren Hanakai estate. En route from China, the attractive young Hakka woman Bong Nyuk Tsin had been discovered among the all male Chinese immigrants. To foil a rape and claim her as his own, the cagey Mun Ki had lied she was his wife. The man who had kidnapped her from her village for a hell in a Honolulu brothel is killed in tribal fighting during the voyage. At the dock, Mun Ki and the brothel owner argue over the woman. Whip's wife, Purity, intervenes and suggests the Hoxworths hire the pair as domestics as a way of defusing the conflict. They’re provided a spartan wood shack on the estate to live in.