Isle of Forgotten Sins

This Producers Releasing Corporation distribution straight from poverty row has just about everything you could imagine or want to see and hear in a B picture second biller: barroom brawls, sunken treasure, a treasure map, an underwater grotto, double-crosses, fist fights, hold ups, restless natives, menacing drums, a big storm, and a flashlight-wielding marionette in a diving suit. But wait, there's more: classical music, torch songs, island ballads, synchronized swimming, beautiful girls wearing sarongs, Gale Sondergaard and above all, Sidney Toler naked to the waist and dripping wet in a bathing suit. If you have a taste for B movies, this is truly must see entertainment!

Gale Sondergaard is the mistress of -- well, let's say it's a gambling house. It's a gambling house filled with girls. Sondergaard looks great and is fun in the role. Some of her employees are pretty and also act well. Veda Ann Borg, for one, is always good for some fun. Some of the girls are pretty. A few of the bit players, as was the case in the lesser studios, look like basset hounds with long hair.

John Carradine is kind of wasted in the role of the hero. He's fine but this was not his forte. Sidney Toler, so upstanding as Charlie Chan, is not nice here at all.

Edgar G. Ulmer does a fine job with this low-budget affair. I had never heard of it, and I thought I'd seen all his movies.

It's most fun when it stays within the genre, ruled over by Marlene Dietrich, of the good woman with a bad reputation working in a place with a terrible reputation. When it turns to adventure, it gets a little tiresome. But it's not a bad movie.

And Ulmer may have been the director who best, and most frequently, used classical and operatic music in his movies. Sure, some did when they were doing biopics of composers. But even here, we have an excellent score.

Isle of forgotten sins but called monsoon in roku... the 1943 one. They kind of snuck this one past the censors. It's pretty obvious (but not spoken) what marge's girls do for a living. So taboo at the time. Gale sondergaard was the perfect vamp in so many classics...she was great in wyler's "the letter". In the south seas ( the back lot), the women run a "gambling house" wink, wink..that the officials are trying to shut down. And of course there are two men fighting over marge. In the worst staged fight ever filmed. Then a dead body! And sunken treasure! So much going on. Toler is krogan, who shows an odd smile now and then, for no reason...? John carradine popped up in some pretty huge films, but not usually the lead, never any oscars. Funny.. there's subtitles, but the sound is so rough, it skips and misses a lot. At about twenty five minutes in, the (roku version) captions show "fu** over his gold", but the actor actually says "fork over his gold"! It's okay. One demerit for picture and sound quality. One for frequent use of backdrops and stock footage. Story written and dircted by edgar ulmer. His big hit was black cat, back in 1934. He later resigned rather than make a musical with shirley temple, if the imdb trivia can be believed. He worked for years at producers releasing corp, the lowest of the low budgets. But it's still a wacky, fun adventure.

Had I known who the romantic leads are in this film I would have made it a point to see it years ago. How often do you get the opportunity to see Gale Sondergaard and John Carradine play characters better suited to Humprhey Bogart and Lauren Bacall? ISLE OF FORGOTTEN SINS is a thoroughly enjoyable South Seas adventure with Carradine and Sondergaard, cast completely against type, doing terrific work for low budget miracle worker Edgar G. Ulmer. Add Frank Fenton as Carradine's battling buddy, Sidney Toler as their jovial adversary, Rik Vallin as Toler's classical piano-playing second mate and Veda Ann Borg as a treacherous native girl, clever use of a puppet (!) for the deep sea diving scenes and a climactic monsoon -- what more do you need?

NOTE: The running time of this film is usually listed as 82 minutes. The video print I watched (from VCI Video) ran 76 minutes, and did not appear to be missing anything major.

John Carradine and Frank Fenton drink a lot and get in fist fights, some over Gale Sondergaard who's a bar owner/madam (?) of a bunch of American bar girls/hookers(?) on a little south sea island. A scene at the beginning when Gale wakes up the girls fascinates me for some reason. Veda Ann Borg is very campy as a two-faced "native" girl. Gale -- that big kitty -- does a great acting job in this silly, fun mishmosh.