Isle of the Dead (RKO, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8:45 p.m. I started the second leg of our Hallowe’en marathon and ran the fifth and final disc in the boxed set The Val Lewton Collection, containing his final two films at RKO, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam. Both films were directed by Mark Robson, both were period films (as James Agee lamented at the time, the advent of Boris Karloff as star of the Lewton unit moved Lewton away from contemporary stories towards period pieces; ironically most of Lewton’s earlier films had been set in a recognizable urban America and had brought horror home to a U.S. audience in a way Stephen King’s Carrie, from over 30 years later, is frequently credited with innovating), and both were based on pieces of visual art that also inspired major pieces of music by Russian composers. Isle of the Dead was based on an 1880 painting called Die Insel der Toten, also known as Die Toteninsel (both are German equivalents for “Island of the Dead”) by Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). Sergei Rachmaninoff composers a tone poem based on the painting in 1908, though he was inspired not by Böcklin’s original but by a black-and-white reproduction, and when he finally saw the culor version he was disappointed in it and said he probably wouldn’t have composed the piece if he’d seen that one first. Rachmaninoff’s music can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbbtmskCRUY, with a color version of Böcklin’s painting on the screen as the music plays. (The musical piece inspired by the same visual source as Bedlam was Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, composed in 1953 to an English-language libretto by W. H. Auden and his partner,Chester Kallman, which was based on the same series of etchings by William Hogarth as suppoled the imspiration for Bedlam.)

A black-and-white reproduction of the painting is also seen under the opening credits of the film, which in some ways anticipates Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal and also acquires new relevance in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The story takes place off the coast of Greece during a successful war Greece fought in 1912 in which they and their allies, Serbia and Montenegro, took on Turkey under the Ottoman Empire in its last dying days. General Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) has just led his troops in a successful battle against the Turks, but he summarily executes a colonel in his army (Sherry Hall) whose reinforcements arrived late. Pherides confides to Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer), an American journalist who’s embedded in his army, that he shot the colonel even though they were old friends to maintain discipline in his army and reinforce his reputation as “The Watchdog.” Then he explains to Oliver that he once was married, but his wife died and is buried on an island just across from the site where the battle took place. Unfortunately, when the two men arrive on the island they learn that an epidemic of septicemic plague, an invariably fatal disease, has broken out there. Pherides immediately takes command and starts ordering the island’s other inhabitants – British diplomat St. Aubyn (Alan Napier), his sickly wife Mary (Katherine Emery). Her nurse Thea (Ellen Drew), Swiss archaeologist Dr. Aubrecht (Jason Robards, Sr.), his housekeeper Madame Kyra (Helene Thimig), and British tinsmith Andrew Robbins (Skelton Knaggs). Robbins is the first to catch the plague, and when he dies Pherides and Dr. Drossos (billed as “Ernst Dorian” but actually Ernst Deutsch; World War II was still going on when this film was made and he probably didn’t want to be billed under so heavy-duty a German name) impose a quarantine on the island and insist that no one be allowed to leave.

Pherides also finds that the tomb of his late wife has been desecrated and her body destroyed, and Aubrecht takes responsibility because it was he who inadvertently let the local residents know that they could make money by selling items from the old tombs, including classic objects from antiquity he was hoping to unearth and study. Pherides and Drossos also explain that the disease is transmitted by fleas, and if the wind keeps blowing northward the people on the island will still be contagious, but if the hot sirocco wind blows in from the south, the heat will kill all the fleas and the threat will be over. But some of the native characters believe the deaths are actually the work of a vorvolaka, a sort of Greek werewolf, an evil spirit who can assume human form. When Dr. Drossos himself gets the plague and dies, the others (some of them, anyway) are more convinced than ever that a vorvolaka is among them, and they suspect Mrs. St. Aubyn’s nurse Thea. Oliver, who has fallen in love with Thea, plots to sneak both of them off the island, but Pherides prevents this by destroying the one and only boat. Mrs. St. Aubyn has a morbid fear of being buried alive, and she actually is, due to a cataleptic trance she goes into that leads the other characters to believe she’s dead. When she finally escapes, she’s gone insane and stabs Pherides and Kyra, thus saving Thea’s life since Pherides was about to kill her in the belief that she was the vorvolaka, and then leaps to her own death from a beach-side cliff. The winds finally change and make it safe for everyone still alive on the island to leave, and Oliver and Thea make their long-delayed escape (how? Did they repair the destroyed boat, or was there another one on the island all the time?).

Isle of the Dead was a film Mark Robson remembered having arguments about with Jack J. Gross, who had taken over as Lewton’s supervising producer after his predecessor, Lew Ostrow, had left the studio (in earlier posts I’d said that Ostrow died and Gross replaced him, but according to Robson, Ostrow just had disagreements with the studio executives and he lived until 1956). One day Gross brought an important executive from RKO’s theatre division who started ragging them about how stupid he thoguht the story of Isle of the Dead was and also warned Robson not to include any “messages” in the film. Robson recalled telling him, “I’m terribly sorry, but there is a message in this movie – death is good!” Isle of the Dead doesn’t seem to me to be quite as good as it did when I was ini junior college and I saw it and the other Karloff Lewtons for the first time – I was probably exaggerating when I compared it to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal even though both films are about soldiers cast adrift in the aftermath of a plague – but given that we’ve just lived through COVID-19 (in fact, are still not over it!), stories about pandemics and the ways people respond to them, both good and not-so-good, once again seem chillingly relevant.