Enchanted Island

In the 1940's, minimalist Dana Andrews seemed like a real person in movies surrounded by actors... but by the mid-to-late 1950's he sometimes looked like a hired stock actor completely misplaced, especially for the Hermann Melville adaptation of Typee titled ENCHANTED ISLAND...

Where he and equally miscast Don Dubbins are two sailors from a late 19th Century ship (captained by a grouchy Ted de Corsia) that lands on the titular South Pacific location, and they aren't allowed to have fun with the loose native girls...

And for 90-minutes Andrews helps an injured Dubbins, too weak to even cross a small creek, into a jungle setting where the rest of the programmer's highlighted by Dana's far too easy male-fantasy courtship with Jane Powell as a gorgeous, blue-eyed native whose leader, Friedrich von Ledebur, may or may not be a cannibal...

Yet this matters very little since the ISLAND is too limited for an adventure; young dopey Dubbins splits too soon for a buddy-action flick; the couple has meager chemistry for a genuine romance; and with natives so friendly there's hardly any suspense, making Powell's scantily-clad garb and the pulp-novel-cover aesthetic the only ENCHANTING aspects on board.

"Enchanted Island" is a decent enough film but the terrible ending...well, that ruins much of the good I'd seen in the picture up until then!

When the story begins, a crew of a 19th century merchant ship has just landed on Nuku Hiva island in the South Pacific. Despite seeming like a great place to chase the pretty native girls (or, perhaps because of it), the jerk-face Captain orders everyone back aboard the ship...they're heading out! Not surprisingly, the crew is angry as they haven't had shore leave in 14 months! In fact, a fight breaks out and two of the men, Abner and Tom (Dana Andrews and Don Dubbins) run into the interior of the island. Despite hearing that the Typee people are savage cannibals, they're treated pretty well up until the two really spoil everything.

The film is based on Herman Melville's first novel and is a modestly entertaining about life among the savages of Acapulco, Mexico where the film was actually made. However, the ending is bad in several ways-- you just have to see it to believe it...and believe me...you WILL hate it as it makes no sense at all. A sad waste because of this.

This movie was Alan Dwan's 406th as director. It was also his next to last. It stars a sozzled Dana Andrews as a sailor who has jumped ship on a tropical Island and Jane Powell as the Polynesian princess he falls in love with. She is, of course, the member of a tribe of cannibals.

The script takes Herman Melville's turgid novel about religion masquerading as evil and vice versa, and converts it into a brightly-lit Technicolor adventure story. Like others of Dwan's movies of the period, it combines a lesson about duality -- I'm not sure what the lesson was, but it's clearly there. Blond, slight Don Dubbins offers that contrast.

Mostly it's interesting for the way cinematographer Jorge Stahl manages to light bright greens and blues in a sepia world.

This odd adventure film, set in the tropics and probably shot in Hawaii, stars the horrendously miscast Dana Andrews as a lawless sailor who falls in love with an island maiden, essayed here by whiter than white Jane Powell in an equally turgid performance. I can't comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation, as I haven't read Melville's novel Typee, but Enchanted Island looks cheap (regardless of the colourful locales), is poorly acted, and is thoroughly dull. Even Jorge Stahl's colour cinematography looks like it was shot on leftover stock or 'ends'. A less than satisfactory late career move by director Allan Dwan, Enchanted Island is only for extremely loyal Andrews completists.

"Mutiny On The Bounty" with an enema. Wonder if being in ghastly crap like this drove Dana Andrews to drink or if the bottle steered him to the movie steerage, so to speak? Probably the later, but oh my god what a long, depressing end to a great acting career! Almost Kay Francis-like, huh? And as long as we're on the general subject of artistic declension how about this film's director, Alan Dwan, one of Hollywood's better dream meisters, whose attitude toward the female Polynesians in this, his penultimate, film resembles that of a drunken Shriner at a Luau? Give it a C minus.

PS...Has Hollywood ever done right by Melville? Can't think of any examples off the top of my head. I mean "Billy Budd" was embalmed Oscar bait and Huston's "Moby Dick" was just a botched job all around.