Richard Talmadge is a writer looking for the inspiration to his next book. He finds it in Helen Ferguson, whose stepfather is a sea captain, on his way to a mysterious island where he believes pirates have buried treasure. Talmadge stows away. When found, he leads the crew on a chase through the rigging, then is assigned as cook's helper.
But the crew mutinies, kills the skipper, and a fire starts. The mutineers leave in a life boat. The cook and one helper leave in the other. This leaves Talmadge to build a raft for Miss Ferguson and him. Naturally they all wind up on the island where the treasure is buried.
The copy this DVD was drawn from was in middling shape, with the section where Talmadge builds the raft and they wind up on the island covered by titles. Donald Drazin offers a fine little score, as usual. If there are a couple of bits where I wonder about the logic, well, that's normal for a Talmadge film. He started out as a circus acrobat and became Douglas Fairbank's stunt coordinator. Then he struck out on his own, with a series of cheap and amusing B movies which featured his acrobatics and the occasional fire; here the chase through the ship's rigging shows off his strong points. After a decade of this, he returned to being a stunt coordinator and assistant director through the 1970s. He died in 1981, aged 88.
