King of the Islands

King of the Islands (1936)

** (out of 4)

Technicolor short from MGM has a shipwrecked sailor (Warren Hymer) washing on shore of an island where the locals believe they have to give their Princess (Wini Shaw) to the volcano. The street-talking, NYC native decides he loves the Princess so he tries to win her heart. This film is like so-many early Technicolor films in that it's great to watch for the colors but everything else is pretty much lacking. The actual story is rather lame and it's doubtful anyone will fall for the love story going on. I think it's fair to say that everyone knew the important thing was the color so the story, direction and musical numbers were mailed in. We get two or three musical numbers but not a single second of any of them are entertaining or worth viewing. At twenty-minutes the film goes on way too long without anything interesting happening. Shaw and her rather provocative top are nice to look at but Hymer's mugging of the screen isn't all that charming. As many bad things that are here I must still recommend the movie for those who are interested in the early color films. The entire "look" of the film is marvelous and we get some really beautiful looking scenes including the colors at the top of the coconut tree. You'll certainly notice the scene when it happens because the colors are simply amazing.

A shipwrecked sailor (Warren Hymer) gets washed up onto the tropical island Wally-Wally. He is welcomed by the local natives. He learns that the beautiful Princess (Wini Shaw) has been betrothed to the volcano. There is a lot of tribal dancing. There is some silly witch-doctor broad comedy done poorly. There is a love potion hanky. The story is pretty bad.

At least, it's in color. There is a lot of brown aside from the blue sky. The colors are ok, but they're not popping enough. The greens need to stand out from the browns. Most of the screen is a dull earth tone color. It's an interesting look into early Technicolor.

The Vitaphone shorts were originally intended to be experimental and tested out the new Warner Brothers sound system before they ultimately released "The Jazz Singer". Following the release of the film, they continued to make Vitaphone films...even after sound became the norm. So, it's very fitting that Vitaphone also tested out a new innovation in their shorts as well-- Three Color Technicolor. While there were earlier color systems (such as Cinecolor and Two Color Technicolor), they weren't true color but were made with a more primitive system where a blue-green and an orange-red strip overlapped the black and white strip. The colors, not surprisingly, tended to look very orange and green! With three strip, three different color strips overlapped the black & white strip...and resulted in vivid color. The only problems were that the films needed A LOT of lighting to make the picture look good and not too dark. And, the colors in the earlier versions of this system tended to look very over-saturated--with colors so intense it almost looked better than real life!

In this Vitaphone short, Warren Hymer plays a sailor who washed up on some Polynesian island. He instantly falls in love with the island princess, which is a serious problem since she's already been promised as a sacrifice to the Volcano god! But Warren is determined and by the end of the picture, he's pretty sure he's finally gotten the girl. What did he REALLY get? Watch the picture!

This is a pleasant little picture but unlike most of the other color shorts, the emphasis is on story...not the singing and dancing. Mind you, there is some of that but the real emphasis here is on the comedy...and with a lovely joke at the end of the movie. Well worth seeing.

Warren Hymer is shipwrecked on the island of Wally-Wally, where Wini Shaw is scheduled to be thrown into a volcano, but nothing will stop her singing 'The Love Song of Kalua'.

Despite a certain amount of production numbers and mugging on the part of Hymer, the point of a lot of these early Technicolor shorts was to show off the Technicolor process. In this one, the dominant theme is variations on earth colors, browns and greens -- even the flowers are distinctly brownish -- to show off the naturalistic aura of the South Seas and the rather boring good taste of Natalie Kalmus, the ex-wife of Technicolor's founder. Eventually she was shipped off to Britain, where her advice was ignored by Powell and Pressberger.

Still, Miss Shaw is pretty and the chorines dancing the hula are graceful. There's also some interest in this as a technical artifact in the evolution of color in the movies.