Island of Doomed Men

The year 1939 is recalled as one of the greatest in cinema history with so many milestone productions like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, but it’s also the year when two different studios released two different films about a madman enslaving innocent men in the jungle who brings about his own downfall by killing a pet monkey. Paramount’s release was the Anna May Wong vehicle, Kurt Neumann’s Island of Lost Men, based on a stage play, while Columbia cast Peter Lorre in the nearly identically titled Island of Doomed Men, based on Robert Hardy Andrews’ original screenplay. Lorre plays Stephen Danel, who runs a secret diamond-mining slave colony for paroled convicts on the island he owns, which just happens to be called Dead Man’s Island, and from which there is no escape unless you’re “paroled to a pine box”; Lorre plays Danel as soft-spoken, sleepy, and depressed, which only serves to ratchet up the character’s menace and volatility. The handsome Robert Wilcox plays Mark Sheldon, a government agent who has himself convicted for a murder he didn’t commit just so he can get inside Danel’s enterprise and bring it down (the film’s somewhat ludicrous plot requires wholesale suspension of disbelief; better just to go with the flow). Rochelle Hudson plays Danel’s nervous wife Lorraine, who is as much a slave as the shirtless men outside pickaxing in the heat; when Sheldon arrives at the island, he sees Lorraine, along with Danel’s cook Siggy (George E. Stone), as potential allies in his investigation. While much of the cast and crew come from Poverty Row backgrounds, the film contains moments of intense noir artistry blazing across the screen, especially whenever characters awaken at night.