Smuggler's Island

Steve had fallen in love with Macao when he was in the Navy. Now he was content scratching a living there as a diver off it's coast. He's having his fortune read in a cantina when Vivian takes over the reading. She's done her homework on him and wants him to dive for some medical supplies from a wrecked plane in the sea. He checks himself when he discovers that he's actually recovered gold for her. His mistrust of her deepens when he finds out she has a husband interested in the gold. But Steve falls in love with Vivian just the same. Jeff Chandler looks every bit the sailor Steve. Evelyn Keyes is good as the dubious Vivian. I was drawn to this movie by it's title and the great German poster for it (Piraten Von Maco). I enjoyed the menacing setting of Macao where a 1,000 eyes watch. The scenes of Macao and Coloane give this adventure a touch of authenticity.

Edward Ludwig was a specialist of adventure movies: WAKE OF THE RED WITCH, JIVARO, CARIBBEAN, FLAME OF THE ISLANDS. This one is a good film, for those who are nostalgic of this fifties period, a period that provided an atmosphere which we will never see again. Jeff Chandler is as good as usual in this role made for him. Exotic perfume, action scenes, romance on the South seas and islands, what else can we ask for?

"Smugler's Island" is the sort of adventure film you might watch and soon after forget that you ever saw it in the first place. It's because the film is incredibly mediocre...neither good nor bad...just a very standard adventure story and no more. I can't help but wonder if perhaps the cast had been different (such as Robert Mitchum playing Jeff Chandler's role) or a re-write might have helped.

Steve (Chandler) is an American expatriate who lives in Macao, a colony on the coast of China that was controlled by Portugal until 1999. There he makes money doing odd jobs with his boat. However, in the case of Vivian Craig (Evelyn Keyes), she wants him to do something VERY dangerous and potentially VERY rewarding. She wants him to use his boat and diving equipment to retrieve $200,000 in missing gold. But there turn out to be several important things she failed to mention...such as her being married. She also doesn't mention that some very bad people are likely to get in their way!

While the movie is okay, one scene in particular is among the worst I've seen in recent memory. Vivian is angry at Steve and slaps him. He slaps her back! But soon the pair have a liplock on each other that is one of the most passionate kissing scenes you can imagine...just after the two slapped each other! Talk about weird!

As for the rest of the film, it features some decent diving sequences and action...but also Marvin Mitchell playing an Asian guy! His accent is actually pretty good, but Mitchell looks about as Asian as Ricardo Montalban! Overall, a film that really looks as if Univesal Pictures really wasn't trying very hard....just trying to get it done and then on to the next project.

The title does tee this up to be something better, but in the end this has more of the air of a standard "Charlie Chan" feature to it as we take a trip to the Portuguese colony of Macau where we encounter "Kent" (Jeff Chandler). He's an American diver, a bit down at heel, who in turn happens to luck out with the visiting "Vivian" (Evelyn Keyes). Nope - not in the way you might think - well not immediately, anyway, but she offers to pay him $1,000 if he will help her retrieve a cargo from the murky depths. When we discover what that is, well then there is soon no shortage of other interested parties - not least estranged husband "Allan" (Philip Friend) and local crime boss "Bok-Ying" (Marvin Miller). They need to get the goods to the safety of Hong Kong - but what chance? Well, that's just one of the problems with this lacklustre crime drama. There's not the slightest amount of jeopardy as the plot follows a path as surely as if it had only recently been dredged across the Pearl river. Chandler and Keyes don't really gel at all and the less said about the not-so-menacing Miller the better. The story itself is all pretty derivative, but that needn't have mattered so much had the underwhelming Chandler managed to impose himself on the blandness of the film, but he can't and although the fog-bound ending is quite excitingly delivered, the rest of this is all just a bit forgettably so-so. Where was Robert Newton?

The problem is the gold is actually there. Evelyn Keyes tricks him to go hunting for it by fooling him with a false bait: he is hired as a diver to go saving a cargo from a wrecked plane loaded with medicines and drugs, but when the cargo is is saved it is pure gold worth $200,000. She wants to share it with him ignorant of the dangers of smuggling gold around Hongkong, the word goes around, and soon the whole area of smugglers and pirates are interested in their cargo, which they intend to sell in Hongkong, including the authorities and a real pirate, and naturally everything goes wrong, particularly since Evelyn's husband turns up and wants to share the party. In the end everyone double-crosses everyone and almost no one is left alive, some getting hoist by their own petards. It's an ordinary adventure yarn, worth watching for the sake of Jeff Chandler, as it is always a pleasure to find old films with him that you haven't seen before. Prepare yourself for some fireworks.