Island Captives

A rather jumbled work cobbled together from a variety of footage, this adventure tale is ostensibly set upon and near Tahiti, although California's Catalina Island fills in for the latter, with stock footage added from Polynesian sources that depict happy locals in their natural setting, framed against basaltic crags and bluffs, collecting breadfruit, splashing about in the Pacific Ocean, and that sort of thing. Some thick ear playing marks the film, while the plot is actually too complex to be properly handled during the brief duration of this piece that provides approximately 45 minutes of narrative, sans the Polynesian scenes of gamboling, one of which unaccountably is spliced within the middle of the story's climactic moments, apparently to stimulate audience alertness, focussing upon netting of fish, capturing a large sea turtle and other prizes, all with an exotic backdrop. A coffee plantation owner on Tahiti, John Carsons (John Beck), whose high grade crops are particularly valuable, rejects a forceful invitation to join a monopolistic coffee distribution combine, and soon after is murdered as price for his independence, by cartel henchmen while in his own plantation office. John's daughter Helen (Joan Barclay), not aware of her father's slaying, has departed upon a sea voyage to visit him, during which she is wooed by the vessel's radio operator Tom Willoughby (Eddie Nugent), and also by the son, Dick Bannister (Henry Brandon), of the murderous cartel chief, Dick having managed thanks to the screenplay to obtain a convenient method of joining the liner's passenger list, with an intention of persuading Helen, the unknowing heiress, to join up with the international coffee marketing syndicate. After the ship founders against a reef, Helen, along with her two admirers, and an officer, escape to safety in a lifeboat, touching down upon "Mystery Island", near Tahiti, upon which resides, in a seeming geographic vacuum, a clump of ne'er-do-wells, including Kelley (Charles King), a villainous smuggler who has made of the island his private domain. With no supply craft expected for two months, and with lecherous Kelley making portentous advances toward her, Helen gladly accepts Tom's support in addition to the tolerable but unreliable friendship proffered by a local native woman, Taino, performed with her native Mexican cadence by Carmen Laroux, a former mainstay supporting player in Three Stooges short films, cast here as mistress of Kelley of whom she approves in this manner: "..he only beats me once a week, and sometimes gives me presents". Barclay is a talented, undervalued actress, and since her dialogue is unsweetened by any form of originality, she ad libs some delightfully unexpected and witty lines while aboard ship, contributing additional "business" later, thereby crafting a winning performance. Cinematographer Glenn Kershner, whose dramatic closeups are a primary reason for the artistic success of the 1925 Ben Hur, must here largely compromise his aesthetic bent for his only assignment as director, due to an inordinately small budget, but does manage to construct a startling bit of expressionistic camerawork during the shipwreck scene, providing the best sequence of an awkwardly devised film.

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