Isle of Forgotten Sins [Monsoon] ** (1943, John Carradine, Gale Sondergaard, Sidney Toler, Frank Fenton) – Classic Movie Review 5731

Story writer/ director Edgar G Ulmer’s exotic but trashy 1943 movie tells a below-par, clichéd tale of a search for a sunken ship with a $3 million cargo of gold in the South Seas.

However, there is an above-par, amusing cast for a PRC black and white B-movie adventure, in which John Carradine and Frank Fenton star as treasure hunters Mike Clancy (Carradine) and Jack Burke (Fenton) who dive for the booty and clash with Captain Krogan (Sidney Toler). Intrigue and double-crosses precede a monsoon.

Gale Sondergaard also stars as Marge Willison, the proprietress of a seedy nightclub-cum-restaurant-cum-gambling hall-cum-brothel picturesquely called Isle of Forgotten Sins, who meets the two treasure hunters and persuades them to cut her in on the deal.

Raymond L Schrock’s screenplay is based on Edgar Ulmer’s story. Ulmer’s direction of the available material is sufficiently skilled and inventive to make it atmospheric and entertaining.

Also in the cast are Rita Quigley as Diane, Veda Ann Borg as Luana, Rick Vallin as Johnny Pacific, Tala Birell, Betty Amann, Marian Colby, Patti McCarty, C Montague Shaw, William Edmunds and I Stanford Jolley.

It was first shown on American TV on 6 October 1948. It runs 82 minutes but the 2004 National Film Museum Incorporated print is the later reissue version re-titled Monsoon, minus the director credit and shorn of eight minutes of footage.

Extraordinarily, Ulmer’s contract with PRC made him the only producer to be able to commission a score, so he choose his long time friend Leo Erdody, whose music includes several Wagnerian themes and songs. Carradine sings ‘Whiskey Johnny’ among the film’s several songs, and the film also features an underwater sequence using a marionette and of course the expected tropical monsoon climax.

The film was shot at Corriganville movie ranch in six days for $23,000 but also re-using footage from PRC’s Jungle Siren. Ulmer found 200 miniature trees from John Ford’s 1937 film The Hurricane and wrote a South Seas story based on ideas he had while a production assistant on F W Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas.

The nightclub/restaurant/gambling hall/brothel called Isle of Forgotten Sins caused censorship problems of course when the Production Code Administration insisted that the nightclub hostesses of the film could not actually resemble prostitutes.

[Spoiler alert] The original ending with the self-sacrificing watery suicide of Clancy and Marge to save Diane had to be changed.

Sondergaard was the first recipient of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her film debut in Anthony Adverse (1936).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5731

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