Furious Island

I'm not certain if TCM ran a morning/afternoon salute to Margaret Lindsay some time back, but I inadvertently watched two of her movies in close succession. I put up a post on Broadway Musketeers some time back, so as is my wont now I'm writing up a post on Isle of Fury now and saving it in drafts to post at some point in the future.

The movie opens with one of those title card intros that were not uncommon through the 1930s, talking about the Pacific Islands being a good place to escape one's past. One one such island, Tankana, Val Stevens (Humphrey Bogart early in his career and with a ridiculous moustache) is about to get married to Lucille Gordon (Margaret Lindsay) against the backdrop of a raging storm. As with White Shadows in the South Seas, Val is part of the lucrative pearl trade, although he's rather kinder to the locals to the point that he offers to go down and do the work himself to show them there's not really any danger, although that's a plot point to be discussed later in this post.

More importantly is that the storm leaves one of the passing ships in distress, so the people on the boat have to be rescued: Tankana is one of those islands that doesn't have a harbor for the big ships; instead, a small tender has to go out to where the big ships anchor and pick up and drop off people. The two people who are worth mentioning among those brought to the island in the storm are young Eric Blake (Donald Woods), and Captain Deever (Paul Graetz), who it's not really discussed why he wasn't the last man off the boat. Deever looks like the sort of "this man has a shady past" trope you'd expect from an old Hollywood movie, while Blake is closer to leading man handsome. He, too, isn't entirely open about why he's on the island.

As you might guess, with Lucille tending to Blake, the two begin to develop feelings for each other. This, even though Lucille took those vows to be faithful to Val. Blake and Val also start to become friends in part because Blake helps save Val's life when Val goes under the sea to harvest pearls, only to have to face... a giant rubber octopus! So that's why the locals didn't want to do the work. They really were in danger.

There's more danger for Val because he has the pearls and the cash locked up in his warehouse, and that's a logical point for shady characters who would like the money themselves to attack. Captain Deever, meanwhile, is constantly in the background eavesdropping, with everything about Val's past and the reason for Blake and Deever being on the island revealed in the finale.

I didn't notice on watching the opening credits, but Isle of Fury is actually based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, which probably helps explain the inclusion of one character I didn't mention, alcoholic Dr. Hardy (E.E. Clive) who serves as a sounding board for the other characters. The material isn't bad, although this is decidedly a B movie from the time when Bogart was working his way up the ladder. Bogart supposedly didn't like it, which I'd guess would have had to do with the octopus scene. It is, also, a B movie so the plot feels rather rushed at just 60 minutes. If Warner Bros. could have come up with a script of a programmer length closer to 80 or 90 minutes they might have been able to get a pretty good movie rather than a B curiosity. But even as just a little B movie Isle of Fury is worth watching.