Thursday, March 30, 2017

Movie review - "Island of Doomed Men" (1940) **1/2

Enjoyable B picture from Columbia - I'm not that familiar with that studio's B output but presume they made a lot of them. It benefits from Peter Lorre in the lead. He runs an island which works on slave labour. Robert Wilcox goes undercover to bust him - in a quite extreme convoluted way which doesn't do him much good because Lorre's figured out pretty quickly that Wilcox is a narc.

Bad for Wilcox. But on the sunny side Lorre's annoyed a heap of people on the island, including, his trapped wife Rochelle Hudson and cook George Stone and guard Charles Middleton.

It's unpretentious, fast paced and a bit clunky story wise. Director Charles Barton later made some of the best Abbott and Costello movies and I thought he did a good job. Lorre is great fun. Much is made of the physical attractiveness of Wilcox - this was different. Wilcox is a handsome dude; I hadn't heard of him - he married Diana Barrymore and died young.

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