"Let's take a look at you. A hapa haole, two people jumping around inside the same skin." In an era when our president, son of an interracial union, frolics with his children in the surf off Kailua, it's fascinating to revisit this epic of passion and prejudice set in 1959, the year Hawai'i was granted statehood and when interracial marriage was still a felony in several states.

Charlton Heston plays King Howland, scion of a pineapple dynasty who oversees his Oahu plantation on a white horse and is courted as a senator for the new state, even though his racism is apparent to all. His political ambitions and anti-native bigotry, however, are disturbed by an engagement between his beloved younger sister (Yvette Mimieux) and her underachieving native boyfriend (James Darren), whose potential inheritance of the family name and fortune Howland can't stomach. But how can he forbid this alliance when he himself has a secret Chinese mistress (France Nuyen), now pregnant with his child? Howland's hereditary control over all he surveys is beginning to crumble with the dawning of a new era–and a new kind of man, embodied in Dean Kahana, the fiancé's mixed-blood brother (George Chakiris), who's become a doctor without any patronage from the King. Just the idea of hapa haole Kahana bothers Howland, and the good doctor's very presence soon ignites fireworks of racial and sexual taboos across Hawaii's spectacular tropical landscape. With steamy melodramatics worthy of Douglas Sirk, the little-seen DIAMOND HEAD bears comparison to other widescreen, big-star treatments of interracial romance like ISLAND IN THE SUN and SAYONARA.