Isle of Missing Men (Richard Oswald Productions, Monogram, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Thursday, July 13) I watched a couple of “B” films on Turner Classic Movies that turned out to be surprisingly good. Both were set among prisoners during World War II and both were directed by German expatriates. The first film I watched was Isle of Missing Men, made in 1942 at Monogram Pictures and directed by Richard Oswald, who I hadn’t realized was one of those hapless people who kept having to flee the Nazis; he went from Germany to Austria, then France and finally the U.S. Isle of Missing Men was based on an old play called The White Lady by Gina Kaus and Ladislas Fodor (after the White Lady cocktail – https://www.diffordsguide.com/cocktails/recipe/2091/white-lady-cocktail – favored by the story’s heroine) and, according to the credits, both produced and directed by Richard Oswald, who also got a job for his son Gerd Oswald as assistant director. Oswald also co-wrote the film’s adaptation with Edward Eliscu, best known as a songwriter (his best-known credit in that department is as the lyric writer for Vincent Youmans’ great songs for the first Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film, Flying Down to Rio), and Eliscu did the final screenplay with Robert Chapin. At least one other major behind-the-camera talent was involved: the cinematographer was Paul Ivano, a man of major reputation who’d worked with Rudolph Valentino and documentarian Pare Lorentz and had been one of the many technical people enlisted in trying to make a releasable film out of Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly, starring Gloria Swanson. The people in front of the camera are a mixed bag: the male lead is John Howard, whose best-known credits are as Ronald Colman’s brother in Lost Horizon (a brief reference to Shangri-La in an early scene in Isle of Missing Men appears as a sort of in-joke) and as Katharine Hepburn’s snooty, stuck-up fiancé in The Philadelphia Story (in which he loses her to her ex, Cary Grant).

The female lead is Helen Gilbert, who was playing cello in the MGM studio orchestra when director Fred Wilcox saw her and wondered why so strikingly beautiful a woman was working behind the camera instead of in front of it. She went through six marriages and five divorces (one of her husbands widowed her) and a long series of well-publicized affairs with various men, including Howard Hughes, while acting in surprisingly few films. The reason became pretty obvious not long into watching Isle of Missing Men: she couldn’t act for beans. Time and time again she just stares into the camera and tries to let her physical charms do her acting for her – much like another much-married starlet at MGM at the time, Lana Turner, though at least Turner’s career lasted long enough to become a passable actress (and actually a pretty good one in occasional films like Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake of Imitation of Life). The plot of Isle of Missing Men casts Howard as Merrill Hammond, warden of an island prison on Caruba, which sounds like a car wax but is in fact a small atoll about 100 miles off the coast of Australia. We meet him on board a tramp steamer, the S.S. Bombay, where he’s sailing back to Caruba. Also on board is Richard Heller (Egon Brecher), a formerly famous writer who, like Richard Oswald, has been fleeing across the world one step ahead of the Nazis. Hammond offers to let him off at Caruba and find him a place to live, but a Japanese bomber strafes the S.S. Bombay from the air and, though the ship and the other passengers survive intact, Heller is machine-gunned to death. Hammond’s attention is diverted by yet another passenger, Diana Bryce (Helen Gilbert), who accepts Hammond’s offer of a trip to Caruba. Diana is a “woman of the world” who wants to go to Caruba to spring her husband, Dan Curtis (Gilbert Roland), who’s a prisoner serving a sentence for murder – though he insists he acted in self-defense. Needless to say, Hammond has no idea that she’s married, let alone that her husband is one of the prisoners in his charge, and of course he’s got the hots for her and doesn’t realize she has the mother of all ulterior motives.

Though in his previous stays on Caruba Hammond had been sleeping in the barracks, this time he reopens a bungalow he’d previously built for his late wife (who died just two months after she arrived) and has Diana move in. He also invites the rest of the prison’s top staff – his assistant George Kent (a nicely authoritative performance from Bradley Page), the prison’s alcoholic medic Dr. Brown (Alan Mowbray, playing the sort of role Dudley Digges or Alan Dinehart had once played), and Bob Henderson (Kenne Duncan, later star of innumerable Republic serials and part of the Ed Wood stock company) – for a formal dinner at which Diana performs Chopin’s Étude, Op. 10, no. 3 (which Monogram music director Edward Kay also uses as the theme for the film’s background score). Director Oswald gives us some nice shots of Helen Gilbert’s fingers moving to the right spots on the keyboard; she was a fully trained musician, after all! The island is also beset by a typhus epidemic and both Hammond and Dr. Brown have to sign a lot of death certificates. Ultimately Diana persuades Dr. Brown to sign a phony death certificate for Dan Curtis as part of her plot to help him escape – she’s arranged with another tramp-steamer captain to smuggle them aboard for money and jewels – but in the meantime she’s sneaked a peek at his criminal record and found that it includes bigamy. (We’re not told, probably due to Production Code strictures, just which of Dan’s marriages is bigamous, but we presume it’s his one to Diana.) Of course the revelation that Dan is a bigamist immediately turns Diana off to him, and though Dan gets aboard the tramp steamer Diana stays on the island with Hammond. Ultimately Hammond resigns his post as warden and he and Diana leave the island together, while Dan picks a fight with the members of the steamer’s crew and gets himself killed for real.

I thought the ending was disappointingly weak – where I thought it was going was that Dan would get typhus and die for real, and instead of the nonsensical happy ending we got I was thinking it would end like Casablanca or The Third Man, where even though Dan was a two-timer and dead Diana would still be in love with him, or at least his memory, and wouldn’t pair off with Hammond just because he was there. But until that rather unfortunate climax, Isle of Missing Men is a quite good movie, respectable by any standards and several cuts above the usual Monogram dreck, beautifully photographed by Ivano and effectively directed by Richard Oswald, though even he couldn’t get a halfway decent performance out of Helen Gilbert.