King of the Damned

Conrad Veidt as usual does a lot by doing very little as he provides the brain and Noah Beery the brawn in this rollicking plea for prison reform; shot in a heatwave, and boy does it show!

It is likely that this well meaning film would not have attracted the large crowds required to pay back the high production costs,thus becoming another nail in the coffin of Gaumont British.In the 1930s they decided to try and crack the American market so many American actors were brought over to play leading roles.So here we have Helen Vinson and Hoah Beery,in tandem with Conrad Veidt.Alas the policy just didn't work.With a recession occurring in 1937/8 Gaumont British,the biggest company in the British film industry had to shut down its production side.Balcon left first to MGM and then to Ealing where he was to make his mark for a quarter of a century,but not by making films like this.It is a very interesting film but you have to wonder what possessed them to make this film at this time.

In this story, the fictional Island of Santa Maria is the setting...a place much like Devil's Island in French Guyana. The prison's philosophy is simple...the prisoners are scum and anything you do to them is acceptable. Inmates die all the time and are a miserable lot...so it's hardly surprising that they are plotting an uprising. And, considering how brutal and hellish the place is, you really cannot blame them. The leader of this movement is one of the trustees, prisoner #83 (Conrad Veidt). And what is 83's name? Who cares to the folks running this place...he's just another piece of filth who deserves all you give him!

I appreciate this film because you find yourself rooting for the prisoners...the guards and folks in charge are THAT vicious! Most prison films never achieve this, though "Brute Force" comes pretty close.

So is it worth seeing? Absolutely. The film is quite exciting, well written and kept my attention throughout. I wish it had ended a bit differently....but that's more due to personal preference as opposed to the ending being weak.

I can't think of a single bad performance by Conrad Veidt in any movie I've seen him in. That doesn't mean he was not in some poor movies, of course. It means he was always believable and interesting, whether playing Death, Jesus Christ or the Nazi-est of Nazis.

One of the poor movies he was in was KING OF THE DAMNED, one of British Gaumont's attempts to break into the American market in a big way with an expensive production and American stars -- here Noah Beery and Helen Vinson.

Veidt, Beery and an assortment of actors are prisoners on some sort of international Devil's Island, where Helen Vinson is visiting because her father is commandant. He's dying, and his replacement is so bad, the convicts stage an uprising and win. Of course, Veidt and Vinson fall into Production-Code-limited love, and of course, the evils of the convict system are similarly softened; the sort of sequences that had made I WAS A PRISONER FROM THE CHAIN GANG so powerful three years earlier are missing, and so the entire movie is softened. Perhaps it might have done better under the direction of some one other than comedy/thriller specialist Walter Forde, but I doubt it. This was not a time at which an effective movie of this sort could be made.

Despite the oddity of casting Americans in a British movie, there is little doubt that casting Veidt was a good idea. He makes the entire movie watchable, even though Beery gets to show off a sly sense humor. Miss Vinson is, alas, not up to the standards of her co-stars. Still, Veidt and Beery make this one watchable.

With the Great Depression still dragging on in 1935 and the Spanish Civil War already brewing, who could blame the US and other western nations for nervousness about the rise of socialism? In this thinly disguised parable about revolution by the oppressed masses, a brave creative team tackles a subject that was a political hot potato in its time. It's not too hard to see that the scriptwriters' sympathies lie with the downtrodden prisoners, and unfortunately there's a preaching quality to the slow-moving script which tends to carry over into the acting. For this reason it's not one of Conrad Veidt's best performances (you'll know him better as a nasty Nazi in Casablanca). The movie is partly redeemed by some quite high production standards in other areas, especially the staging of the large crowd scenes.