Isle of Fury

They must have filmed half of the script and just called it a wrap. Poor writing and acting abound, and the mustache is worse than the octopus! Skip this one unless you really love Bogart.

This laughable 60-minute stinker offers pre-star Humphrey Bogart as a South Seas pearl merchant married to Margaret Lindsay. There might have been a decent story here, but it's been hacked to pieces. During the wedding there's a shipwreck, and washed ashore are a sneaky captain (Paul Graetz) and strange passenger (Donald Woods). Hilarious scene with the louvred door... The storm howls outside, but the slatted door keeps out all the wind, rain, and noise! Anyway, Woods and Lindsay seem to hit it off right away while Bogart is blithely unaware. Storyline includes striking pearl divers because of the "devil fish" and thieving natives. E.E. Clive is droll as the preacher, and Gordon Hart plays the weird grandfather. Bogart battles an ugly moustache and possibly the worst-looking octopus in film history. The acting is terrible across the board, with Gratez and Hart coming off worst. Lindsay and Woods are boring, and Bogart is just plain miscast. The plot twist at the end does little to save this one.

ISLE OF FURY (Warner Brothers, 1936), directed by Frank McDonald, is an obscure 60-minute feature most notable as one of the first starring roles of movie icon, Humphrey Bogart. Having made a promising start as the cold-blooded killer in THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936), the studio kept Bogart busy in an assortment of major and minor film productions such as this. Though best appreciated playing gangsters or secondary to the studio's top actors of the day as Edward G. Robinson, Pat O'Brien and James Cagney, Bogart shows he can play the romantic hero as well. Supported by capable studio stock players as Margaret Lindsay and Donald Woods, with material based on the novel "The Narrow Corner" by W. Somerset Maugham, this edition was hardly original in concept considering that it was previously filmed three years earlier (1933) under Maugham's original book title with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Patricia Ellis and Ralph Bellamy. Regardless of which film version adapted by a renowned author is better, both screen adaptations remain forgotten by film scholars.

Forward: "There still remain far from the lanes of travel, myriads of unmarked islands, the refuge of lost men." Set on the island of Tankana, the story opens with a private wedding ceremony of Valentine "Val" Stevens (Humphrey Bogart) to Lucille Gordon (Margaret Lindsay) during a massive thunderstorm outside. After taking the wedding vows. Val is informed of a boat nearly covered by high waves of an offshore reef. He runs out to rescue passengers, Eric Blake (Donald Woods) and Captain Deever (Paul Graetz) and brings them to his cottage. As Blake regains consciousness, the first face he sees is Lucille, and replies to himself as beautiful. With Val in charge of a pearl diving expedition, he's quite busy getting his native divers to work. Val allows Blake to keep Lucille company in his absence. After being rescued by Blake from being trapped by an octopus while diving in the ocean below, Val and Eric not only become the best of friends but offers Eric a job position working as his partner. Eric turns down the offer for reasons of his own. Rumor starts to spread around the island regarding both Val and Eric's past secrets and the possibility that one of them is wanted for murder of a Richard Lord back in the states. Also in the cast are E. E. Clive (Doctor Hardy); Gordon Hart (Grandpa Anderson); Tetsu Komai (Kim Lee) and Miki Morita (Oh-Kay).

It is often felt that second features tell a whole lot more than those on a two-hour range. ISLE OF FURY is one of them. Though the characters are not fully developed (The Lucille character lived on the island all her life and had made a promise to her now deceased mother to marry Val is not fully explained). Regardless of unanswered questions, ISLE OF FURY has enough material with interesting diving scenes to hold interest.

Available on DVD format, ISLE OF FURY gets some cable television exposure on Turner Classic Movies for those interested in watching Humphrey Bogart early in his Warner Brothers career, and a very rare instance where Bogey sports a mustache. (**)

Businessman Val Stevens (Humphrey Bogart) is recently married to Lucille (Margaret Lindsay) when he rescues Eric Blake (Donald Woods) and Captain Deever (Paul Graetz) from drowning. Eric sons falls in love with Lucille, but Eric may not be what he seems.

Isle of Fury is a pretty stereotypical Somerset Maugham plot coupled with a stereotypical South Seas island romance. None of the actors are very good, with the possible exception of E.E. Clive as a Bible-quoting doctor and Paul Graetz as the blackmailing ship's captain.

A mustached Bogie gives probably the worst performance of his career as Stevens, and the romance between is Donald Woods and Margaret Lindsay is silly, as the two have no chemistry whatsoever.

However, the highlight of this otherwise totally forgettable film is the sequence where Bogie battles an octopus - it has to be seen to be believed.

Isle of Fury which starred Humphrey Bogart, Margaret Lindsay and Donald Woods is a remake of a previous Warner Brothers feature, The Narrow Corner based on a novel by the same name by W. Somerset Maugham. The original film came out in 1933 and starred Ralph Bellamy, Patricia Ellis, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in the roles played by Bogart, Lindsay and Woods respectively.

Knowing how things operated at Warner Brothers and also having seen both the original and remake they did of The Dawn Patrol, I'm willing to wager half the next month's rent that whole chunks of the film, all the action sequences are just carried over from the original film. That's just how Jack Warner did things over at his studio.

I'm also willing to bet knowing the original source is Somerset Maugham who also wrote that racy epic Rain baed in the South Seas that the original since it was before the Code was a great deal spicier. The new version is 9 minutes longer and probably the spice has been removed.

Warner Brothers never got anywhere near the South Seas, probably the film was shot in Catalina. The plot concerns Bogart and Lindsay who are being married as the film opens when news of a foundering sailing ship off their island and hung up on a reef brings a call for rescue. Only two get rescued, the captain Paul Graetz, and a mysterious passenger Donald Woods.

Bogart and Woods hit it off and become friends and Lindsay and Woods hit it off even better. Both Bogart and Woods however have something in their respective pasts.

The part that Bogey plays is something he might have done later on with bigger budgets. This film was done on the cheap, the special effects are crude by today's standards. Today of course the movie going public would demand location shooting in some place like Fiji or Samoa.

It's B picture from Bryan Foy's B picture unit at Warner Brothers so take it for what it's worth.