Hell's Island (1955)

I love this movie so much

So much average

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This is a surprisingly good movie for being a B feature with no stars and no special names of attraction to it. Above all, it's a well composed and intriguing story. It's a tropical noir in flamboyant colour and with Francis L. Sullivan as the most interesting character, here in a wheel-chair, leading the hunt for a missing invaluable ruby lost in an air crash on this unidentifiable Caribbean island full of mysteries.The leading lady, a former mistress of John Payne's, is the spider in the web of the mysteries with a husband locked up for life and imprisoned on another island outside as responsible for the death of the one casualy of the air crash, who had the ruby. Well, let's not proceed any further here, since the story as such with all its intrigues and tunnels, twists and turns cannot be told better than by the film.The very adequate music adds to the magic of the tropical island and the dame of mysteries and intrigue, and there will be some more casualties before the skies eventually will clear and show what really happened, Francis L. Sullivan making the most striking exit in his wheel-chair.

HELL'S ISLAND was the third Karlson-Payne film project, a color noir shot in widescreen. This time the director and star were not working for independent producer Edward Small, but instead for the Pine-Thomas unit at Paramount. The somewhat larger budget given this production allowed it to be made in Technicolor and VistaVision. The story has Payne in pursuit of a stolen ruby down in the Caribbean, which causes him to cross paths with an ex-girlfriend who deals in deception. Mary Murphy plays the femme fatale; and Paul Picerni is her imprisoned husband that Payne may or may not help break out of jail. Karlson's hard-hitting direction was praised, and so were the colorful characters, and Payne's tough performance.In addition to the three film noirs they made together, Karlson and Payne would collaborate again on television. They both worked on the Studio 57 episode 'Deadline' broadcast on February 26, 1956.

A guy gets hired to find someone's ruby and some stuff happens. Sorry to be so vague, but it's a nondescript kind of movie. Very familiar scenario with the usual shadowy characters, convoluted backstory, femme fatale, double-crosses, witnesses suddenly getting killed, and so forth. It's executed well enough but has little spark. Earlier Phil Karlson directed John Payne in 99 RIVER STREET and KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL, both much more exciting and memorable films. Not that Payne is bad here, nor is the direction, it's just a meh movie. It is a joy to see Francis L. Sullivan... although he doesn't much screen time, he does have a hell of an exit scene. As for the visual style, it's a VistaVision Technicolor production... unfortunately my copy was fullscreen, faded and damaged, so I can't really comment. Worthwhile if you really need a noir fix, but pretty bland.

After 99 River Street and Kansas City Confidential, world-weary bruiser John Payne teams up with director Phil Karlson for Hell's Island, this time in VistaVision (Payne apparently had the foresight to see that television would become a profitable market for color films). After being jilted, Payne drank himself out of a job in the L.A. district attorney's office and now serves as bouncer in a Vegas casino. A wheelchair-bound stranger (Francis L. Sullivan) engages him to locate a ruby that disappeared in a Caribbean plane crash; the bait is that it may be in the possession of the woman (Mary Murphy) who jilted him. Payne flies off to Santo Rosario and into a web of duplicity at whose center Murphy waits (she does the "femme" better than she does the "fatale," however). There's a splendid moment when she shuts up her doors and draws the curtains on the memory of her rich busband, now in a penal colony across the subtropical waters for supposedly causing the deadly crash. The movie's texture is spun from Payne's carrying a torch that fails to illuminate the amplitude of clues and warning signals all around him. Professionally done if not especially memorable, Hell's Island remains an enjoyable color noir -- the Payne/Karlson combo rarely disappoints.