Another of the movies that TCM ran back in July during their salute to B movies was a Monogram picture I'd never heard of, Isle of Missing Men. Since this is another one where the plot sounded interesting, I decided I'd give it a go and recorded it to be able to watch it later.
The movie opens up on a ship sailing from India to Melbourne, Australia. Since the movie was released in 1942, World War II is raging, and among the people on board is a stowaway escaping the Nazis the long way around, an author named Richard Heller. He doesn't really know anybdy in Australia, but fortunately, one of the passengers is a man named Merrill Hammond (John Howard). Howard is the governor of a prison colony on an island off the coast of Australia called Caruba, so the presence of this author is solely to introduce Hammond and have a reason to bring somebody onto the island.
That somebody, however, isn't going to be Heller, who dies of a heart attack and is of no further importance to the story. Of course, there's another passenger who could use to spend some time on Caruba, a lovely blonde named Diana Bryce (Helen Gilbert). She's the sort of mysterious lady that you wonder how she winds up on a ship like this, and wonder whether people like this exist in real life. But Hammond seems immediately taken with her -- there must not be that many women on the island -- and decides to invite Diana to spend a week in a spare bungalow he'd had built on the island.
When we finally get to Caruba, we find that there's a prison doctor, Dr. Brown (Alan Mowbray); a prison governor, Kent (Bradley Page); and a whole bunch of violent prisoners. Oh, and there's one prisoner who seems bemused by all the violence, one Dan Curtis (Gilbert Roland). It's easy to see why the prisoners would be violent; after all, you'd have to have committed a pretty serious crime to get sent to a prison colony like this, and conditions on the island are lousy. Heck, those conditions are about to get a whole lot worse thanks to a typhoid epidemic.
Diana is one of the only women on the island, so it's no surprise that other men besides Hammond take an interest in Diana. Among these is Dr. Brown. But perhaps more importantly is Curtis. Then again, it turns out he has a relationship with Diana and that Diana's whole point in trying to get to Caruba is to help Curtis escape from the island. No wonder he sat there bemused when the other prisoners started fighting when we first saw the prison island.
There's not all that much to Isle of Missing Men, but that's to be expected considering it was a B movie that runs a shade under 70 minutes. It's low budget, which is decidedly noticeable in the sets. It's there in the script, too, which seems rushed and gives some of the characters motivations that don't make much sense. It's not bad by B movie standards, but it's certainly not the greatest movie you'll ever see by a long shot. In short, it's the sort of thing that was churned out quickly when movie theaters still had double bills and needed short B movies to fill out those bills. See it, forget it, and go on to the next movie.
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