Mysterious Island, The |
  • USA • 1929 • 95m •    • Directed by: Lucien Hubbard, Benjamin Christensen, Maurice Tourneur. • Starring: Lionel Barrymore, Jacqueline Gadsdon, Lloyd Hughes, Montagu Love, Harry Gribbon, Snitz Edwards, Gibson Gowland, Dolores Brinkman, Karl Dane, Robert Dudley, Angelo Rossitto, Carl 'Major' Roup, Billy Schuler. • Music by: Martin Broones, Arthur Lange, William Axt, Paul Lamkoff.     On a volcanic island near the kingdom of Hetvia rules Count Dakkar, a benevolent leader and scientist who has eliminated class distinction among the island's inhabitants. Dakkar, his daughter Sonia and her fiance, engineer Nicolai Roget have designed a submarine which Roget pilots on its initial voyage just before the island is overrun by Baron Falon, despotic ruler of Hetvia. Falon sets out after Roget in a second submarine and the two craft, diving to the ocean's floor, discover a strange land populated by dragons, giant squid and an eerie undiscovered humanoid race.
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Review:
Supposedly this 'Mysterious Island' is a film version of Jules Verne's novel, but the only story elements surviving the transition are an island, a submarine, and an embittered patrician who's also a scientific genius. Count Dakkar (Lionel Barrymore, more restrained than usual) is building his super-secret subs on an island off the coast of some Graustarkian country. Meanwhile, he knows there's a race of weird aquatic creatures living on the ocean floor nearby. He knows this because at regular intervals another bone washes up on his island ... and Barrymore is putting these bones together, one at a time, to form a skeleton. I found this extremely contrived: how convenient that all the bones are in proportion (rather than some being adult specimens and others from children) and none of them are redundant (he doesn't find two right femurs, for instance). Each new piece of jetsam conveniently and neatly fits the specimen-in-progress. Still, it's eerie to see a weird inhuman anatomy slowly taking shape as Barrymore adds one more bone to the jigsaw skeleton.
Count Dakkar's rival is Baron Falon, who is probably annoyed at Dakkar because counts outrank barons. The pair of them (plus the romantic leads and some miscellaneous henchlings) end up in two super-subs on the ocean floor, which is inhabited by these weird little duckbilled aqua-men who look like upright platypuses. There's some splendid photography by Percy Hilburn, simulating the ocean floor. Far away, we see one tiny creature walking towards the camera. When he gets closer, he looks like dwarf actor Angelo Rossitto in a Donald Duck costume ... but the image onscreen is still oddly compelling. Later, the aqua-men turn up in droves: some walking, others swimming. It turns out they like to drink human blood ... but how often do they get any? When Baron Falon's diving-helmet shatters, all the little platypuses start licking his blood. An astonishing scene.
There's some rather bad scene continuity. Jacqueline Gadsden (very pretty, but no actress) spends all her early scenes wearing an elaborate crinoline hoop-skirt. She even wears this thing when she gets aboard Barrymore's submarine. Then, all at once, she's inside a deep-sea diving-suit. Did she cram the entire hoop-skirt and all those petticoats into the diving rig? We find out later that she changed into some coveralls ... but this should have been established in a transition shot.
The directors of part-talkies were usually careful to select WHICH scenes would use recorded dialogue. In 'Mysterious Island', the talkie sequences are quite arbitrary. Gadsden, as Countess Sonia, speaks all her dialogue in the form of silent-film intertitles. Late in the film, she's captured by Baron Falon, who conspires to mislead handsome idiot Nikolai (Lloyd Hughes) by enlisting a henchwoman to imitate Sonia's voice over a crude audio system. The camera shows Hughes reacting while a woman's voice (supposedly Countess Sonia's) emerges from a nearby loudspeaker. As we've never actually heard the real Sonia's voice in any previous scenes, we've no way of judging if the henchwoman's vocal impersonation is accurate.
In spite of its many faults (including a patchwork script), this movie is extremely enjoyable.
Review by F Gwynplaine MacIntyre from the Internet Movie Database.
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