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Isle of the Dead
Better as a painting than a movie
1945
Review: October 17, 2005
Director: Mark Robson
Starring: Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Helen Thimig
Fine, but not needed.
THE SETUP:
Group of people is quarantined on a Greek island when plague breaks out. Tensions and superstitions mount.
DISCUSSION:
The word on the street is that producer Val Lewton was given titles by the studio, and tasked to come up with the best movie he could based around that title. This seems to be the case with Isle of the Dead, inspired by the famous painting by Böcklin. The painting is genuinely moody and mysterious, and it’s an interesting project to come up with a movie to build upon a tone set by a painting rather than an idea for a plot or a character. It also doesn’t completely work.
The movie begins with a title telling us that the myths of the Greeks have devolved into superstition by 1915, noting the tales of the vorvolaka, a sort of cursed figure that brings death.
We get enter an army tent, where a commander is telling Boris Karloff, his superior, that his campaign failed because his men failed him. It’s not really his fault, but Karloff orders him to be taken out and shot, because he has such rigid ideas of military responsibility, etc. An American journalist is there and comments on Karloff’s actions, but a few seconds later the two of them are enjoying a leisurely stroll as pals, which seems odd considering Karloff just essentially killed an innocent man. During the stroll they happen upon a cart loaded with dead soldiers, one of the many eerie touches of the film. Karloff says the bodies have to be burnt immediately to prevent the spread of the plague.
Karloff is going to a nearby island to visit his wife’s grave, and the journalist decides to come with him. You can see above how the island in the movie is closely modeled after the painting that inspired it. They go, and though a circumstance I just don’t have the energy to go into, end up at the house of a European resident of the island, who has a man, his ill wife, and her nurse as guests. There is also an older native Greek woman, Madame Kyra. She confides in Karloff [whom she trusts because he is ethnically closer to her] that she has suspicions about the young nurse, since it seems odd to her that one woman should be rosy and healthy while the other is sickly and pale. This leads to a great deal of talk on superstition versus logic and medicine, and prayer versus science, which continued unabated throughout the film.
Karloff and the journalist decide to spend the night, but overnight one of the guys dies of plague, meaning they are now quarantined on the island. They get a doctor in [resulting in the many prayer vs. science discussions], and, as they are now all stuck in close proximity to one another, tensions start to mount. This is not helped by Kyra’s insistence that the young nurse is the vorvolaka, and will bring death to them all. From this point there’s not much for them to do except die one by one, and for Karloff, who has started to believe that the nurse is the vorvolaka, to get ever crazier.
There is a really good device toward the end, which I won’t reveal here. It’s a great idea, but it’s telegraphed so for in advance that it doesn’t do so much to enhance the creepiness when it plays out. Similarly, there are a lot of interesting themes here, but none of them really worked for me, and they’re so on the surface that they’re robbed of their mystery and resonance. There is a great deal of good atmosphere, but ultimately that’s about all this one amounts to.
I watched this as part of my Val Lewton boxed set, and while it made for a decent rainy afternoon, the direction was not all that distinguished and the story pretty lame. If you’re ready to have your mind blown as mine was, let me inform you that Robson went on to direct Phffft!, The Harder The Fall, Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, and Earthquake, a fact that has led today’s top cineastés to exclaim: “WTF???”
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
For the Val Lewton completist. Otherwise, if it isn’t on TV and it’s not rainy and you’re not really bored, I wouldn’t bother.
