Island of Doomed Men (1940)
Directed by Charles Barton

Film Review

When 20th Century Fox's series of Mr Moto films came to a sudden end in 1939, Peter Lorre spent the next few years slumming it in a number of B-movies which mostly failed to make the use of his unique talents as an actor.  Towards the lower end of the film noir quality spectrum is Island of Doomed Men, a cliché-sodden and pretty unimaginative entry in the prison-escape line which would be hard to stomach were it not for Lorre's chilling central presence as a quietly sadistic slave master.  By this stage in his career, Lorre had taken understated villainy to a fine art and here he is at his most menacing, an emotionless fiend who kills domesticated animals in a fit of pique and gets a kick out of whipping anyone who disobeys him, although, on the plus side, he does like piano music and his dress sense is impeccable.  "Don't make me do anything else, Lorraine", he pleas, in that flat whispering voice of his when he has just shot dead a cute little monkey, "Please, don't..."  It's as if he can't help being psychotically nasty and just wishes he could be nice.  Poor Peter.

And poor Robert Wilcox, straitjacketed in a one-dimensional hero role trying hard not to be bored by the whole proceedings.  Apart from a liberal dose of sadomasochistic fun in which whips and chains play a large part, there's not much going for his character and it's left to Rochelle Hudson to drive the stuttering plot along as Peter Lorre's implausibly sensual and sensitive wife.  Hudson's striking beauty is the perfect counterpoint to Lorre's horror, and it is no surprise that the film's best scenes are those featuring these two charismatic performers.  If Lorre is aware of and mildly disgusted by his own vile nature, Hudson is positively repulsed by it and there's a wonderful perversity to their prisoner-and-captive relationship.  They appear to enjoy being hurt by one another.

Director Charles Barton does what he can with the half-baked screenplay, although Benjamin Cline deserves more credit for his suitably moody photography which lends great menace and tension to the piece, even when it all falls apart in the final act.  On close examination, the plot makes no sense whatsoever, and on paper at least the characters are the crudest and silliest of archetypes.  Peter Lorre's relentlessly sinister presence confers on the film a longevity it probably wouldn't otherwise deserve, but, flawed as it is, Island of Doomed Men is still worth noting for its spirited attempts to give the emerging genre of the American film noir thriller a grittier edge than its European counterpart, a whip-lashing, monkey murdering, back stabbing excursion into a new kind of B-movie nastiness.

Film Synopsis

Special undercover agent Mark Sheldon is assigned to expose an illicit slave operation on a remote island in the Pacific run by a man named Stephen Danel.  Framed for murder, Sheldon ends up being condemned to a sentence involving hard labour, but he receives parole and is sent to work on Danel's island, from which no man returns.  Having satisfied himself that Danel is indeed treating his workers as slaves, Sheldon attempts to organise an uprising with the help of Danel's disillusioned wife Lorraine.  He hasn't reckoned with Daniel's ruthlessness and his capacity for staying in control, even when he is surrounded by enemies...