Halloween Diary Gems - Isle of the Dead (1945)

Saturdays have been for my daughter. Sort of a Stephanie's Saturday Pick'Ems. She had been wanting to watch "Silver Bullet", but I had some time in the morning and chose the Val Lewton gem, Isle of the Dead (1945), one of three Karloff was involved in when he left the Universal Monsters behind. In "Isle of the Dead" those who are anti-war might consider him a monster, a war monger like so many others we know too well. He would allow one of his top military men to kill himself for a minor moment of weakness and his men, after days of hardly any food and not only fighting but defeating the opposition, pulling carriages of dead soldiers to be buried instead of the horses available. At the very end, a weakened, plague-ravaged General Pherides has been stabbed by a Greek artifact, the three-pronged trident without the long wood handle, kept in possession by a collector who lives on the Isle of the Dead, basically a cemetery for many Greek people who had lived across on the other side. Who stabbed him? A sickly Mary St. Aubyn, whose husband, a businessman, had died of the septicemic plague, having prevented him from doing harm to a dear colleague who tended to her loyally. But, in actuality, she was cataleptic and feared death (being buried alive, as she explained to General Pherides' chief doctor, Drossos (Ernst Deutsch)), found corpse-like by Pherides and the superstitious maid, Kyra (Helene Themig) while Aubyn's close assistant, Thea (Ellen Drew) was in the room with her. Kyra insists that Thea is a Vorvolaka, this vampire-like, life-sucking creature. While putting up a front as an atheist who only believes in what he can see and feel, Kyra sees that he is a believer when Pherides throws wood in a fire to Hermes, a "good Greek god". Kyra truly believes Thea is some creature that must be destroyed in order for the plague to end, with Pherides not totally surrendering to superstition until his doctor dies of the plague.

In the past I watched "Isle of the Dead" in the late of night. It was always this mood piece, a gloomy reminder that whether in 2021 or 1912, plagues and wars and the fight for control and opposing dissent hasn't went away. Thea defies Pherides, holding him in contempt for taking taxes from the hardworking folks of her own village to be spent on war...sound familiar? While Pherides isn't accustomed to folks standing up to him and voicing their distaste for him, Kyra only encourages that worst part of his character to be exposed. Thea has really done nothing to deserve Kyra's persistent, obsessive focus. Eventually when Mary is put in an antiquities box (the only "coffin" available), Thea has no ally besides the war correspondent following Pherides on the front lines, Oliver (Marc Cramer).

I always respond to a scene the same. Oliver doesn't like Pherides' treatment of Thea. When Pherides destroys the only boat that can leave the island back to the other side, and Thea has went back upstairs to talk with Mary, Oliver tells the general that if he keeps up his behavior they can no longer be friends. I was like, "Oooo, that'll show him how serious you are." It is such a gentlemanly response to an increasingly troubling development of character in Pherides that is obvious. When Pherides insists he won't leave Oliver alone with Thea -- and that he would destroy Thea if she is the evil he believes she might just be -- it is clear an innocent life is in danger as long as Kyra continues to spread her personal fears into the troubled mind of a deteriorating Pherides. 

It is no surprise once Mary breaks from her box, Kyra is the first to take that strike of her overwhelming madness. And Pherides is obviously next, especially when he falls at the bed of Thea, ready to vanquish the evil that now supposedly takes his life, too. Even as madness has overtaken Mary, that revenge for how she ended up this way hasn't been lost on her. And the film won't let her off because she did kill...even if those she killed had been provoking this response with their never-relenting warnings about and towards Thea.

The island setting feels somewhat claustrophobic because the film sort of keeps the plot within a home lived in by Jason Robards, Sr. There is a temple, also. But a majority of the film is centralized to the home as the plague seems to dwindle the numbers. Alan Napier, of "Batman" fame, is among the healthy falling to the plague. Karloff really pulls me into the film with his star power, but when he's out of the big Frankenstein costume, the actor is quite skinny. You can also tell, even in 1945, his back was clearly ailing him. And yet he remains intimidating and stern in how he conducts himself...and as the plague sets in and the superstitions he once kept buried inside come to the fore, Karloff shows that deterioration. He was so true to his convictions until the end, though. As a general, he believed what he did was right. He felt he was morally obligated to the cause, even when it was a plague he was fighting instead of the Ottoman Empire. Mary takes on the appearance of some avenging angel, her burial robe flowing in the wind and the dark hiding her face. Kyra awakens to this angel, with nowhere to go. Pherides, too, cannot avoid the fate that's been chasing him a long time.

"Isle of the Dead" gets lost in the shuffle too often. I quite like it, but when you have so many great films in the Lewton cannon so celebrated, if one of them is solid but perhaps not quite on par, you can see how it might not receive its just due. I would like to think Lewton fans might agree that "Isle of the Dead" is deserved of evaluation during October. While I recently revisited "Cat People" and "The Seventh Victim", I have a special soft spot for "Isle of the Dead". Maybe it isn't of the upper echelon, I still like to advocate for it, anyway. I guess because "The Body Snatcher" is such an acting / character triumph for Karloff, his Pherides, a complex character I think compares favorable to other roles during this era of his career, deserves more renown. And the scene where Pherides and Oliver walk out of their tent, seeing the dead scattered about the area before going to the isle...powerful stuff.