The Mysterious Island (MGM, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 3) my husband Charles and I were ready to watch all three Law and Order shows on the usual Thursday night run, but instead of Law and Order: Organized Crime NBC showed the premiere episode of something called Found, which as near as I could tell from the promos was about a woman who imprisoned a man in her basement for several years, only he escaped and not surprisingly is seeking revenge. Instead of watching this, I dug out the DVD I’d just ordered of The Mysterious Island, a 1929 MGM film, mostly silent but with one major talking sequence early on and a number of scenes with brief bits of dialogue or “wild” noises. It was nominally based on an 1874 novel called L’Ile Mysterieuse by Jules Verne, though in that one the central characters were a squad of five Union soldiers from the American Civil War who crash on the titular “mysterious island.” Lucien Hubbard, normally a producer of MGM’s lowest-budgeted films but who this time around not only wrote the screenplay but took over as director following the burn-out of two far more prestigious “names” from Europe, Frenchman Maurice Tourneur (Jacques Tourneur’s father) and Dane Benjamin Christensen, who were fired from the film in mid-shoot. The film is essentially a reworking of Universal’s 1916 adaptation of Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which drew on not only that book but also two other works of Verne’s, The Mysterious Island and Five Weeks in a Balloon, plus what critic and humorist S. J. Perelman described as “a sanguinary tale of betrayal and murder in a native Indian state that must have fallen into the developing fluid by mistake.”

The Wikipedia page on the 1929 The Mysterious Island describes this as a prequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, since the central character, Count Andre Dakkar, builds and tests his own submarine in his redoubt on Mysterious Island, just off the coast of the kingdom of Helvia. (Just where in the world this is taking place is not all that clear, but the indications are it’s off the coast of Russia, especially since some of the characters have Russian-sounding names like Mikhail and Nikolai and the troops that ride in at the end, though called “Hussars” – which would indicate they’re Hungarian – look and act like Cossacks, whom MGM had just made a movie about with John Gilbert a year before. The Mysterious Island started shooting in 1926, just in time to hit the double perils of the silent-to-sound transition and also the movies’ first real experimentation with color. The two-strip Technicolor process had been first used in a feature in 1922: Toll of the Sea, starring Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong in a story that, though set in China rather than Japan, was basically a knock-off of Madama Butterfly. Films after that like The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (filmed 1926, released 1928) contained color sequences, and occasionally a major studio would release a film entirely in color like Wanderers of the Wasteland (1924), the first color Western, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s The Black Pirate (1926). MGM decided to make The Mysterious Island mostly in two-strip – thereby it, not Doctor “X” from three years later, qualifies as the first science-fiction film in color – though they shot the underwater scenes in plain black-and-white and tinted them green. (Alas, the MGM Video Archive DVD we were watching was only in black-and-white; one reel in color exists in the UCLA labs, and in 2013 someone claimed to have a complete two-strip print from Prague which was actually screened at the silent-film festival in Pordenone, Italy in 2014. But that was apparently a fake, colorized with AI technology, and the giveaway was the underwater scenes were in color when they hadn’t been in the original prints.)

They hired the same expert underwater cameramen, Ernest and George Williamson, who’d worked on the 1916 Universal Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but MGM didn’t give them credit. (Universal had not only given them credit, they’d actually shown them on screen in a prologue.) The Williamson brothers had worked out a system for shooting underwater scenes not with a waterproof camera, but with a normal camera with a periscope lens. The Mysterious Island tells the story of Count Andre Dakkar (Lionel Barrymore, still relatively young and agile before chronic arthritis forced him first to walk with canes and then to use a wheelchair), who has taken over an island that’s actually a dormant volcano. In an early scene he explains to his friend Baron Falon (Montagu Love) that he’s secretly built a submarine from his redoubt on Mysterious Island, where he’s established a government without class distinctions so everyone can contribute equally to his great project. Unfortunately, Baron Falon is determined to overthrow the government of Helvia and use it as a base to take over Mysterious Island and capture Dakkar’s submarine, which he will then use to conquer the world. To do this he’s enlisted an army of revolutionaries called “Hussars” who ride and dress like Cossacks. The romantic leads are Count Dakkar’s sister, Countess Sonia (Jane Daly, true name Jacqueline Gadsdon, whose final film this was; she married William Henry Dale in 1924 and phased out her career, though she stayed with him until his death in 1975 and died herself in 1986 at age 86), and engineer Nikolai Roget (Lloyd Hughes, a not-bad looking leading man). Charles red-flagged her “Countess” title as a mistake, saying that the sister of a count is not automatically a countess. There are a lot of nice shots of Dakkar’s work crew topless – this is a great movie for beefcake fans – and Count Dakkar doesn’t mind that his sister is in love with a commoner, but Baron Falon does.

Count Dakkar says that because Mysterious Island used to be a volcano, there’s a pipeline through it that leads to a lost world containing a race of humanoids who never left the water where all life started, but adapted and evolved to live underwater. He claims to have reconstructed the skeleton of one of them from bones that have washed up from the deep-water world to the island’s coastal waters (another glitch, since the skeleton we see is the size of a normal human but when we finally meet the underwater race, they’re all little people, and indeed some of the most famous little people in Hollywood, including Angelo Rossitto and Carl “Major” Roup, are playing them under the oddball costumes). Nikolai worries that the compressed-air intake manifold Dakkar’s submarine needs to be able to take on enough air to rise to the surface after submerging might have got cracked in shipment, but he takes a test dive in the craft and at least so far it holds up O.K. Unfortunately, by the time he returns Falon has completed his conquest of Helvia and captures and tortures Dakkar and Sonia and tries to get them to reveal their scientific secrets. When they don’t, Falon and his forces attack Mysterious Island, so Dakkar gets all the people he cares about into his submarine and takes it down to the depths. Falon, in turn, commandeers Dakkar’s second submarine and chases him. Dakkar finds the passage under the sea he was looking for and encounters several monsters, including a rather crude dinosaur that’s all too obviously just a living lizard with scales, plates and slabs glued onto him to resemble a prehistoric beast, as well as another creature that looks like a cross between an octopus and a giant crab. MGM credited their in-house team – James Basevi, Irving Ries and Louis J. Tolhurst – with the effects. I think they should have looked outside their own ranks; through most of this film’s production Willis O’Brien was “at liberty,” and the genius behind the effects for The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933) surely would have done better and more convincing work, and especially genuinely scary monsters. The shots of Dakkar’s submarine actually submerging look transparently phony, like a little kid staged them in the family bathtub.

All too much of the movie, especially its later reels, consists of people dressed in deep-sea diving suits standing around the interior set of the sub – and, as I noted in my posts about more recent science-fiction films like Marooned and Gravity about people in spacesuits, people in diving suits look pretty much the same. (One of my problems with Gravity is that there were so many long-shots of people in spacesuits that it wasn’t until the camera got near enough for a close-up that you could reliably tell Sandra Bullock and George Clooney apart.) Hubbard even muffs the Chekhov’s-pistol gimmick: just when we’ve been set up to expect a life-threatening crisis from the failure of that cracked compressed-air intake manifold, it fails not because the crack has split open but because Sonia has thrown a hand-held bomb at it (why?). The Mysterious Island ends with Dakkar deciding that, since it’s inevitable that people will only use his super-sub to make war on each other and ultimately annihilate the human race, he’s going to blow up the sub factory and destroy all the plans so no one else can ever build one. It’s a legitimately powerful ending but also one that a) reflects the mood of the times – particularly the idea that World War I’s sacrifices had been so for naught that the human race should never go to war again (which fed the isolationist movement in America and the support for appeasement in Britain that did so much to bring about World War II), and b) ignores the fact that once someone has shown that a certain technological achievement is possible, someone else can copy it and build it for themselves. The Mysterious Island is a mediocre movie, at a time when there were already enough great science-fiction films to prove that the genre could be filmed effectively: F. Holger-Madsen’s 1918 Danish film A Trip to Mars (Himmelskibet), Yakov Protazanov’s Soviet film Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), Harry Hoyt’s and Willis O’Brien’s 1925 The Lost World, and of course Fritz Lang’s masterpieces Metropolis (1927) and Woman in the Moon (1928). Maybe instead of Benjamin Christensen and Maurice Tourneur, the European director MGM should have hired for this one was Fritz Lang!