Director: Charles Barton
Writer: Robert Hardy Andrews
Stars: Peter Lorre, Rochelle Hudson, Robert Wilcox
Run Time: 1 Hour, 8 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2xxZsvB
Synopsis
Mark Sheldon reports for duty at the Department of Justice. The boss asks if Mark knows what he’s getting into. He’ll be doing some kind of undercover work, and the boss says he’ll deny ever having met Mark. Mark is henceforth known only as Agent 64.
He meets his partner, Agent 46. Forty-six explains that there’s a secret island owned by a man named Danel, who is a slave trader. As 46 explains all this, he’s shot in the back by someone outside. Agent 64 is arrested for the murder, but explains the story so far. He’s convicted and sentenced to prison for one to twenty years.
Before long, he’s in prison and doing hard labor. Apparently, he serves out the entire sentence with no contact with the Department of Justice— I suspect this is not how “being undercover” really works.
Turns out, Mr. Danel owns the diamond mine on the island. He orders the whipping of a prisoner and then goes home to his wife, in a nice house surrounded by an electric fence further in the island. Everyone is terrified of Danel. He knows his wife would leave him if he took her to the mainland, so he keeps her on the island like a prisoner in a gilded cage.
Danel uses parolees as labor on the island, and he has “Mr. Smith,” aka 64, in his sights. Danel gets Smith paroled, and onto his plane for a “job” on the island. The new prisoners sit down to a fancy dinner until a prisoner runs up and warns the newcomers. The men shoot the prisoner and then march all the newcomers off to work in the mines.
Turns out Danel knows who the murdered Agent 46 was, and he knows that “Smith” was involved with him. Danel wants to know what was going on and who was onto him. He knows 64 is a government agent. Another prisoner tells Smith that he can only leave the island one way and he’d do well to just get it over with and be killed.
Lorraine Danel wants to talk to Smith after she learns he’s really an agent. Danel shoots his servant Ziggy’s pet monkey to show us how badass he is. Smith convinces Captain Cort, the head guard, that he is only here to steal Danel’s diamonds from his safe and wants his help. Danel catches Smith and Lorraine together and demotes Cort.
The prisoners all rebel and break into Danel’s housing compound through the electric fence. Danel gets the drop on Smith and Lorraine a second time later that night, but Danel starts monologuing when Ziggy comes in and stabs him in the back. Danel shoots Ziggy and then falls over dead.
We then see Smith and Lorraine flying away from “Dead Man’s Island” on a plane. I wonder if anyone from the Justice Department even remembers him?
Commentary
Peter Lorre had done dozens of films before this one, so he really had his “calm, cold, creepy factor” all worked out by this point. People are always lighting his cigarettes with shaking hands, so it’s obvious they are terrified of him. Although we don’t see him actually do much, their fear speaks volumes. It would have been nice to have seen him actually torture someone of something like that, but 1940s censors wouldn’t go it.
It’s entertaining, and has a few surprises, but there’s nothing here that even remotely approaches horror in the modern definition. Men being kept prisoner by a sadist on an island is a good dramatic plot, but horror? Not really. They did kill a monkey, so there’s that, but still, the monkey had it coming.