Sinners in Paradise (Universal, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Port of Seven Seas Whale returned to Universal for Sinners in Paradise and Wives Under Suspicion, out-and-out “B” pictures which still carried the legend “A James Whale Production” (an honorific he’d negotiated with the Laemmles in the early 1930’s) even though they were studio assignments Whale had played little or no role in developing. I’ve written before about Sinners in Paradise at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/07/sinners-in-paradise-universal-1938.html, and while James Curtis is scathing about this movie I rather like it – though less because of Whale than one of the writers, Lester Cole. Cole was one of the original “Hollywood Ten” blacklistees driven out of the movie industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee for being either actual Communists or Left-wing sympathizers, and here (and again in Universal’s The Invisible Man Returns from 1940) Cole sneaks a lot of Left-wing content into this Swiss Family Robinson-esque tale of a motley group of castaways stranded on a South Seas island.

Though Cole had two co-writers, Harold Buckley (who gets the original-story credit as well as one of the screenplay credits) and Louis Stevens, Cole’s touch is obvious in some of the dramatis personae and their agendas: Thelma Chase (Charlotte Wynters), who flees the country after the workers at one of her factories stage a sit-down strike to demand higher wages and a 40-hour work week (she indignantly tears up the telegram announcing this and then later on is determined to strike herself against the arbitrary conditions of her work detail on the island); rival arms dealers Honeyman (Milburn Stone) and Brand (Morgan Conway), who are flying out to China to negotiate weapons saies to all sides in the Chinese civil war; and corrupt Senator Corey (Gene Lockhart), who’s there to help them. There’s a certain novelty in that the conveyance which crashes and strands them on the island is the Sea Bird seaplane (obviously based on the real-life China Clipper, which Warner Bros. had already made a movie about two years earlier), not a ship, and there’s also real pathos in the death of an old woman, Mrs. Franklyn Sydney (Nana Bryant), who’s shot on the beach as the arms dealers hijack the island’s one seacraft, a boat used by their host, Dr. James Taylor (John Boles), to get himself to the island in the first place.

Also on board the plane were gangster Robert Malone (Bruce Cabot, an actor whose career is inexplicable; the huge success of King Kong, in which he was the romantic lead, would seem to have given RKO their own potential Clark Gable, but instead they tried to make him their James Cagney by “typing” him as a gangster) and the hard-bitten woman he’s attracted to, Iris Compton (Marion Martin, a striking screen presence in her platinum-blonde hair and tough-as-nails attitude; she’s one of those players you feel should have had more of a career than she did), as well as top-billed Anne Wesson (Madge Evans, a star on the downgrade but still a highly talented actress), who ended up on the Sea Bird to exit an unhappy marriage and do volunteer work as a nurse in China. Much of the film doesn’t work – at times it’s so risible it seems the writers couldn’t decide whether they were doing The Admirable Crichton or Gilligan’s Island – but Cole’s social comment and the interesting character arc of John Boles’ role, who first appears as the commanding presence who insists that a bunch of people who aren’t used to having to do honest work must do so for everybody’s survival, and who also has a Chinese manservant, Ping (Willie Fung) who’s one of the most sensible characters in the story (though he’s also saddled with the usual pidgin accent of comic-relief Asians in American films; he’d proven he could act in the 1932 film The Last Mile, as a Death Row inmate whose last request is his body be shipped to China so he can be buried with his ancestors, but he doesn’t get anything like that opportunity here), but who turns out to be a doctor fleeing from a murder charge (another example of imposture in a Whale film and about the only even remotely personal touch in this one).

He and Anne Wesson form a romantic bond and the two ultimately escape in the boat after the screenwriters’ machinations have returned it to the island (only Ping is left after the two arms dealers hijacked the boat and then ended up killing each other, and Ping is fatally wounded and expires just as he brings the boat back to shore) and reduced the number of characters from nine to six, the boat’s maximum capacity, and they sail off into the sunset (with Catalina “playing” the South Seas, as usual in a classic-era Hollywood film) as the end title comes up. Charles noted a series of interesting parallels with Frankenstein: a motley crew is stranded by a terrific storm at the hideout of a disgraced medico, there’s lightning and the threat of fire (set by the Senator when he thinks a boat is passing by and wants to signal it so they can be rescued), and at least two of the Frankenstein cast members are in Sinners in Paradise as well: John Boles (who in Frankenstein played Henry Frankenstein’s old college friend Victor Clerval) and Dwight Frye (seen briefly here as the manservant of Thelma Chase who hands her the telegram about the strike as he is seeing her off). Sinners in Paradise is a wretched movie overall but it certainly has its points of interest.