Devil's Island (1939)

You won't be disappointed!

A Masterpiece!

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

In the tradition of waste not at movie studios the sets made for The Life Of Emile Zola get recycled for this short B film Devil's Island. Boris Karloff steps away from the horror genre and has the lead here. We get both the courtroom and the Devil's Island sets, Jack Warner was being most economical.As cinema this film will never rank with something like Papillon or even Passage To Marseilles which Warner Brothers did a few years later. Karloff plays a doctor who does a Samuel Mudd here, treats a wounded escaping prisoner and is charged with treason and given ten years hard labor at the notorious Carribean prison.It's a harsh and corrupt regime there that commandant James Stephenson runs. Even when Karloff saves the life of his daughter it's back to hard labor for him. But he develops a friend and ally in Stephenson's wife Nedda Harrigan.The ending is rather tacked on and artificial and things get tied up too neatly to be real. But it is nice seeing Karloff not conducting any sinister experiments for a change.

At just over an hour, this prison drama is riveting from start to finish, sort of a follow-up to "The Life of Emile Zola" as it deals with the themes of prison brutality and reform. Like the Joseph Schildkraut character in that 1937 Best Picture winner, this deals with a man unjustly sent to Devil's Island, treated cruelly, yet mercifully saving the life of the daughter of prison head Henry Stephenson. The brutality of the guards lead to rebellion, an execution by guillotine, and later a hopefully successful escape. A weakened prisoner is forced to work, and in his dying moment accidentally pushes his pick into the path of an oncoming carriage, causing the young girl to fly onto the rocky road, but even the death of a prisoner doesn't stop the guards from continuing their brutality. A sincere performance by Karloff and excellent technical work makes this an above average programmer.

At this point in his career, Boris Karloff (1887-1969) was often billed simply as "Karloff" (in all capitals), but for this 1939 WB prison drama he is Boris Karloff. He started in films in 1916 and up until 1931 he was a bit player in B films. Then came "Frankenstein" (1931), "The Mummy" (1932) and "The Mask of Fu Manchu" (1932) and he was off on a whirlwind career that lasted for decades, usually playing the villain. In this film Karloff plays the hero, one of his earliest turns as the guy in the white hat.The film is unremarkable, apart from the heavy handed musical score that is intrusive. Karloff does a good job as the wronged physician, and the rest of the cast do their job adequately. Some of the scenes highlight awful conditions, including the guillotine scene.The film is reminiscent of John Ford's "The Prisoner of Shark Island" (1936) in which Dr. Samuel Mudd is wrongly convicted and sent to prison in Key West where he helped with an outbreak of yellow fever and then was pardoned. Comparing the two, I liked Shark Island better.Looking at other films about Devil's Island, my preferences are for "Papillon" (1973) and "We're no Angels" (1955).

This Boris Karloff movie was very entertaining though it seemed strongly inspired by the earlier film, THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND since there were so many similarities between the two movies. SHARK ISLAND is an account of the real life man, Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was sentenced to a harsh American prison in the Tortugas after he gave medical treatment to a fleeing John Wilkes Booth. Whether or not Mudd knew that Booth had just killed the President is debatable--especially since word of the assassination may not have reached Mudd's home in rural Maryland.In much the same way, Boris Karloff plays a doctor who attends to a seriously injured man. Although Karloff knows the man was guilty, as a doctor he'd taken an oath to heal and couldn't just let the man die. As a result of his kindness, he's arrested and sent to Devil's Island, where he is abused and treated like an animal. What happens next you'll have to see for yourself, but I was very impressed by this simple film that wasn't really a horror film but a film about the human spirit and justice. Karloff, in particular, did a nice job in his role as the hapless doctor, though the script was also very good--making the viewer really care about these men in prison.The only negative, and it's a small one, is the prologue. Because the war in Europe was just beginning, the producers wished to distance themselves from condemning this French institution and so they tacked on a nice prologue saying that this film didn't represent the French people of today. This seemed rather unnecessary, as other prison films don't have similar introductions.