Cinema: The New Pictures, Sep. 17, 1945

(2 of 2)

Sternly pleading a vigilant peace, an enduring remembrance of the miracles of comradeship and cooperation which war has taught, this beautiful film reveals the full meaning of its title only at the very end, when the commentator repeats Sir Francis Drake's prayer:

O Lord God, when Thou givest to Thy. servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished which yieldeth the true glory.

Isle of the Dead (RKO Radio) is a shuddery set of improvisations suggested by the famed, funereal painting of Swiss Romanticist Arnold Bocklin. Quarantined on a tomb-haunted island off the Grecian coast, after one of them dies of the plague, is a strange crew, including a Greek general (Boris Karloff), a sinister peasant woman (Helene Thimig), a genteel Englishman (Alan Napier), his sickly wife (Katherine Emery), their full-blown servant girl (Ellen Drew). For a while, with deliberate restraint, the movie is content to trail red herrings, tune up its infernal machinery and suggest perhaps a few too many moral and psychological implications. Tensions grow as the characters develop a pervasive fear of death.

All this gets started in a very leisurely fashion, but it is done with firm taste and imaginativeness. People who like their horror dished up with a lavish hand are liable to become restless. But they will do well to keep their seats: the time soon comes when a seat is handy for hanging onto.

About 30 minutes short of the end, an improvised coffin is borne solemnly to rest in a resonant stone vault. Its occupant has died before your eyes, but you can't be too sure, for she was subject to cataleptic trances. After the pallbearers have gone, the camera coldly, tenderly approaches the coffin in a silence so intense as to be almost unbearable. When the shriek of the prematurely buried woman finally comes, it releases the rest of the show into a free-for-all masterpiece of increasing terror.

The wild laughs, blown leaves, scrawks and tongue-swallowings of jittery nightbirds, and darkness in an empty room would have pleased and scared the daylights out of Poe himself. For all the film's gently dawdling beginning, horror-specialist Producer Val Lewton and his colleagues have turned Isle of the Dead into one of the best horror movies ever made