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.

Jane Powell and Dana Andrews star in this exotic, south seas story by Herman Melville. Sailor Aber Bedford falls for island beauty "Fayaway". Mean whaler captain Vangs tells the men they have only ONE hour ashore. There's a cheesy fight scene on the beach, when two of the sailors decide to stay on the island, but that's the beginning of the trouble. One of them has an infection from a knife wound, and they have stumbled into the cannibal part of the island. Don Dubbins is "Tom", the wing man. I think part of the charm of this film is that not many people were traveling in the 1940s and 1950s, so seeing a film about "south sea adventures" was extra fun. The story itself is okay. But why would sailors WANT to stay in the village where they could be killed by the natives? They had numerous chances to leave. Run-of-the-mill love story. Boy meets native girl. Boy falls for native. Can this work out, or will their traditions get in the way? Directed by Allan Dwan... he only directed one more film after this one. Pretty good film, mostly for the island adventure theme.

Jane Powell is a native chick who meets up with fathead Dana Andrews.

For 90 minutes everybody runs around through the jungle thicket trying to figure out what the hell is going on. The indigenous peoples are on the loose, a ship captain wants to get underway, Jane is mauled by Dana, and the audience is slapping themselves to stay awake.

Remake of an entirely different film called 'Typee' (an Indian tribe). Not much to recommend. The island warriors are terrible shots and the movie was made too early to have Jane flash her coconuts, not that she would.....

..... maybe she would now, but she's 87 years old. What guy would want to see that? Well, I would, but then I'm a horny mother-- well, never mind.

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.