Island of Lost Men

This film was a remake of Paramount's 1933 programmer "White Woman," directed by Stuart Walker and with Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard in the roles played here by J. Carrol Naish and Anna May Wong. Obviously they weren't going to cast Wong as the titular white woman! The story began life as a 1933 play by Norman Reilly Raine and Frank Butler called "Hangman's Whip" (a better title than either "White Woman" or "Island of Lost Men"), and despite John Howard Reid's comment that it might have been better with a stronger male lead, Laughton and Naish seemed to be engaged in a competition as to who could overact more and do more beaver imitations on the scenery. For the first few moments it seems like Anna May Wong might just be getting a more multidimensional character than usual, but she soon sinks back into the usual "inscrutable" sludge that was her stock in trade as the first Asian-American movie star. Anthony Quinn and Broderick Crawford are so much in the typical character-actor mold you'd never guess from this film that both of them would go on to win Academy Awards. Eric Blore is delightful as usual, though it looks like he got lost on his way to the set of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film and would dearly like to get back. The script by William R. Lipman and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" author Horace McCoy is serviceable (without the creativity they showed in their previous script for Wong, "Dangerous to Know," in which they gave Akim Tamiroff a truly complex character instead of an unredeemable boor), and so is Kurt Neumann's direction.