Island of Lost Men (Paramount, 1939)

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

Eventually Charles and I watched a third movie last night, the second item in the Kino Lorber boxed set of three late-1930’s Paramount “B” films starring Anna May Wong. This was Island of Lost Men, which has in common with One Night Stand Murder a great title that deserved a better film. Charles and I both thought we’d seen this film before, and it turned out that in a way we had; it was a remake of a 1933 Paramount programmer called White Woman, which starred Carole Lombard as the titular white woman entertainer in a cheap Asian nightclub who marries sadistic plantation owner Charles Laughton and goes off with him to his remote rubber farm. Only she meets and falls in love with his overseer (Charles Bickford) and eventually the two escape, while Laughton’s character meets his deserved fate when the native workers he’s regularly abused turn on him and essentially lynch him. For Island of Lost Men Paramount assigned the screenwriters of Wong’s previous (and far better) film Dangerous to Know, William R. Lipman and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? writer Horace McCoy, to adapt Norman Reilly Raine’s and Frank Butler’s play Hangman’s Whip (a much better title than either White Woman or Island of Lost Men, by the way) into a vehicle for Anna May Wong, who as “Kim Ling” took over Lombard’s old part as a cabaret entertainer.

The opening sequence shows Wong singing a song called “Music on the Shore” by Friedrich Hollander (music) and Frank Loesser (lyrics) – Hollander was Marlene Dietrich’s favorite songwriter and his touch is evident in the world-weary character of this song – though I don’t know whether the voice is Wong’s own or a Paramount-supplied double. (Wong performed a cabaret act in Europe in the 1930’s in which she sang, but she didn’t make any records and I don’t think she sang in any of her other movies.) She’s walking through the club billed as “Lily” (a direct reference to Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express, the one film in which both Dietrich and Wong appeared) and holding a string instrument that’s a sort of Chinese banjo but not even credibly pretending to play it. She attracts the not particularly welcome attentions of Gregory Prim (J. Carrol Naish), whom she agrees to marry and move to Prim’s remote plantation with mainly because she’s in search of her father, Chinese general Ahn Ling (Richard Loo, slathered in age makeup to conceal the fact that he and Wong were about the same age; Loo was born October 1, 1903 in Honolulu and Wong was born January 3, 1905 in L.A.). Once at Prim’s plantation she hooks up with Chang Tai (Anthony Quinn), though it’s unclear whether he’s her lover or her brother. They’re both trying to rescue Ahn Ling from Prim’s captivity, which also includes torturing his overseer, Tex Ballister (Broderick Crawford), who in White Woman was Carole Lombard’s lover but in this is barely in the movie except to provide someone for Prim to yell at and ultimately drown.

Island of Lost Men was directed by Kurt Neumann, who cycled through the “B” units at Universal, Paramount and Columbia – though probably his best-known film was the 1958 sci-fi horror classic The Fly, made just months before his death – and he lets Naish get away with some heavy-duty beaver imitations on the scenery. It seems as if Naish was determined to prove in his over-several-tops final moments, “I can overact at least as much as Charles Laughton, damnit!” It’s an oddly entertaining movie but also one burdened by an awful lot of stock footage (including shots of monkeys and a tiger chasing them that probably came from an old Paramount nature documentary) and pretty typical “B” chintziness. In at least one closeup of Anthony Quinn I was sure I could see the tape under his makeup; the standard practice for white (or, in Quinn’s case, half-white and half-Latino) actors to make them look Asian for “yellowface” roles like this was to put tape on either side of their eyes and cover it with makeup, and in this film they didn’t do that good a job of covering it. One wouldn’t guess from their roles here that both Quinn and Broderick Crawford went on to win Academy Awards! It’s also worth noting that the part of Prin’s valet is played by, of all people, Eric Blore, who’s great as usual except he looks like he wandered into the set by mistake from a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie and would dearly (and understandably) like to get back. And Anna May Wong is wasted as usual, though her fabled understatement is welcome in the opening scenes and it briefly looks like she just might be getting a more multidimensional part than usual – an impression that alas doesn’t last.