Island of Lost Men

This film was a remake of Paramount's 1933 programmer "White Woman," directed by Stuart Walker and with Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard in the roles played here by J. Carrol Naish and Anna May Wong. Obviously they weren't going to cast Wong as the titular white woman! The story began life as a 1933 play by Norman Reilly Raine and Frank Butler called "Hangman's Whip" (a better title than either "White Woman" or "Island of Lost Men"), and despite John Howard Reid's comment that it might have been better with a stronger male lead, Laughton and Naish seemed to be engaged in a competition as to who could overact more and do more beaver imitations on the scenery. For the first few moments it seems like Anna May Wong might just be getting a more multidimensional character than usual, but she soon sinks back into the usual "inscrutable" sludge that was her stock in trade as the first Asian-American movie star. Anthony Quinn and Broderick Crawford are so much in the typical character-actor mold you'd never guess from this film that both of them would go on to win Academy Awards. Eric Blore is delightful as usual, though it looks like he got lost on his way to the set of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film and would dearly like to get back. The script by William R. Lipman and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" author Horace McCoy is serviceable (without the creativity they showed in their previous script for Wong, "Dangerous to Know," in which they gave Akim Tamiroff a truly complex character instead of an unredeemable boor), and so is Kurt Neumann's direction.

Island of Lost Men (1939) does not show much of an improvement over Dangerous To Know (1938). The director (this time, Kurt Neumann) again allows the main player (this time, J. Carroll Naish, complete with a particularly grating, phony accent) to grossly over-act and swamp the rest of the cast, although Brod Crawford and Eric Blore give him a good run for his money. Anna May Wong, alas, is rather subdued. The ridiculously melodramatic script may have been tolerable given a different lead (bring back Akim Tamiroff!), even though its stage origins are never less than glaringly apparent. This movie represents the first of a dozen or so movies in which director Neumann teamed with photographer Karl Struss. As might be expected, the lighting is certainly attractive but, alas, nothing special.

Teutonic expatriates Kurt Neumann (director), Karl Struss (cinematographer), Hans Dreier (art director) combine skills in this very loose remake of the 1933 Charles Laughton/Carole Lombard WHITE WOMAN with Anna May Wong cast as Kim Ling, determined to find a way to cleanse her father's discredited name, and J. Carroll Naish is Gregory Prin, in this version a part-Asian overlord of a jungle labor settlement to which visitors are given only one-way passage. Created as unabashed melodrama, the work begins with a first meeting of Prin and Kim Ling where she is performing as "Lily" at a Singapore night club, and when she notices that Prin wears a medallion of her family crest, she accepts his invitation to accompany him to his plantation as guest, where she is introduced to sundry felonious outcasts, one of whom, however, is Chinese "Secret Service" agent Chang Tai, played by Anthony Quinn. Kim Ling discovers among her host's effects the proof that she requires to restore her father's honour, whereupon she and Chang Tai endeavour to bring about Prin's downfall, but the canny villain's informants keep him knowledgeable of this activity, as the rapidly paced affair moves to its highly charged conclusion, at times bereft of logic but never dull. In spite of moderate cutting by the studio, Paramount, ISLAND pleases on many accounts, notably the efficient direction and utilization of some clever script business, along with artistic cinematography and atmospheric sets and scoring, but the playing is sterling as well, with Naish capturing acting laurels with his nuanced reading of the inconsistent Prin, and there are outstanding turns from Eric Blore and Broderick Crawford, Wong playing Wong and singing nicely; efficient editing by Ellsworth Hoagland benefits this crisply done motion picture.

B movie about a woman (Anna May Wong) traveling to a labor camp run by a slimeball (J. Carrol Naish) looking for her father. A remake of the 1933 film White Woman, which I have yet to watch. Let's talk about the cast. We have two future stars in Anthony Quinn and Broderick Crawford. Great character actors J. Carrol Naish, Eric Blore, and Ernest Truex. Then we have cult favorite Anna May Wong, the star of the picture. She's also the only one truly playing to her strengths. The others are fine for the type of movie this is, but I've seen them all do much much better elsewhere. Naish is especially disappointing. He usually brings a touch of sympathetic humanity to all of his performances, even the villains. But here he's all bad with no redeemable traits. Compare this to any number of movies with similar villains played by the likes of Karloff, Lorre, and Atwill and you'll see how generic and uninteresting this performance is. Naish is a legend but this is not one of his best efforts.

It might be argued that any of the movies starring Anna May Wong has an intrinsic element of Asian sympathy, but at various points in this story I felt they were overdoing it. Even though the story is set in Singapore, for purposes of feasibility I suppose, Wong's character's name is China Lily. Conveniently enough, one of her old friends from China happens to wander through her part of town also. Singapore was just a little fishing village apparently. What underscores the initial emphasis on the "exotic" setting and characters is an early comment by the so-called "King of the River" as he orders in the restaurant - "American style hamburger. Forget the onions." It's all too heavy-handed.

Otherwise the story isn't too bad. She is looking for her father, who happens to be a General, known to most of the other characters and when they discover her relation, their attitudes and motivations change. Through her charm she makes a connection with the King of the River and this leads to a positive resolution, if an expected one for this era.

Some of the weakness of the film, as for most of the era, is its reliance on sets and stock footage. Also, the dance with the drums, which is stereotypically "native" in its primitive appearance, does nothing to enhance the idea that the cultures of Southeast Asia are civilized in any way.

This movie is worth watching if you're a hound for the 1930s style of movie-making, or if you like to see the changes in how various cultures are depicted in American cinema. Otherwise, not much to recommend.