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Peter Lorre is that island owner in Island of Doomed Men (1940), the prosaically named Stephen Darnel who runs a mean slave colony, with a sophisticated home enclave of dreams, flowers, a kitchen, grand piano, electric fence and a domestic monkey.
His evil scheme is the penal island of the title, and the whole shebang crashes in on itself because of his inexplicably testy testing to breaking point by a domestic monkey.
Never be put off by people taking this film seriously. It starts as an earnest spy and espionage tale, from the depths of the deep state. From this mythical pre-war unformed form, where the cops and the feds and the state and the secret service are all of an unnamed same.
Espionage connects two men, code named 64 and 46, clever opposites, but an unnamed killer that is never found nor bothered to be bothered about, kills 46, 46 grabs the back side of his suit jacket in faintly acted pain, with no bullet tear nor of course any blood, and lunges to the floor. Preposterousness follows. Sometimes they class this film, as they do on Wikipedia, as horror.
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The shadow of fascism was not merely confined to the battlefields of Europe in 1940; it slithered into cinema screens across the United States, sublimated in monstrous allegories and grotesque villains, cloaked in the somnolent menace of Peter Lorre's weary gaze. In Island of Doomed Men, directed by Charles Barton, Lorre does not merely play Stephen Danel—he becomes the idea of tyranny itself: sentimental, brutal, and confused, a man who thinks love may be extorted with a whip and confirmed by obedience.
This film, despite its laughable pretensions toward narrative coherence, achieves a curious sublimity: it is Lorre's vehicle and his stage, a chamber piece of sadism and delusion.
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Columbia Pictures, never known for generosity in the B-tier, allows Barton a modicum of stylization. The film's photography, supervised by Benjamin H. Kline, is perfunctory in exteriors, but surprisingly loaded with interior shadows and claustrophobic geometry, particularly within the walled domestic prison of Danel's estate. There, amid orchids and electrified fences, Lorre's Danel surveys his empire of broken men and vanished parolees, his voice low, his clothes impeccable, his wife captive.
You dirty slave-trading rat!
Plot, such as it is, operates by the logic of pulp. Federal agent Mark Sheldon (played with lumbering sincerity by Robert Wilcox) is framed for murder and imprisoned, all as part of a vaguely conceived subterfuge meant to infiltrate Danel's island.
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A feminist long short and middle ranger view and perspective of Island of Doomed Men cannot ignore the character of Lorraine, whose gilded captivity mirrors that of the laboring convicts. Hers is not a passive suffering; she schemes, whispers, and attempts escape, however ineffectually. But the film indulges in a masochistic voyeurism. Her pain is not hidden; it is accentuated, beautified, even eroticized by the camera.
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| Classic plot point newspaper montage in Island of Doomed Men (1940) |
The implication, never verbalized but always present, is that her predicament is not merely marital but carnal. Danel does not beat her, at least not on screen, but the threat saturates every gesture. Her servitude is aestheticized, made part of the scenery. This is the usual fate of women in noir-adjacent films of the era: to be both symbol and substrate of male pathology.
Released in 1940, the same year as the Fall of France and the Battle of Britain, Island of Doomed Men reflects an America uneasily poised between isolationism and interventionism. The film's island, a realm of invisible walls and hidden torments, could be read as a dark mirror of the nation itself—a land that insists upon liberty while quietly permitting unfreedom.
The presence of an electrified fence "to keep the animals out" is a bitter metaphor: the animals, of course, are already inside. That the government allows such a place to exist, and even traffics with it through absurd judicial theatrics, speaks to a submerged anxiety about state power and moral blindness.
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| Classic passage of time prison montage in Island of Doomed Men (1940) |
America, in 1940, was still a sleepwalker before the abyss. Roosevelt had been elected to a third term that November, and the Lend-Lease Act loomed in legislative gestation. Fascism was real, but not quite yet the enemy. It was still possible, in the ideological fog of the era, to see the fascist as a figure of both menace and admiration. Lorre's Danel is a philosopher of obedience. He has tamed men, subdued them, bent them to his needs. He simply cannot make them love him.
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The influence of film noir upon Island of Doomed Men is not incidental but intrinsic. Though lacking the urban chiaroscuro of canonical noir, the film revels in existential enclosure. The island is a noir city reduced to its essential qualities: entrapment, duplicity, cruelty.
Light is rare, artificial, and often cruel. Moral lines are blurred. Even the supposed hero is compromised by absurdity; Sheldon, a government agent, allows himself to be convicted of murder, incarcerated, and finally paroled into slavery, all for a cause that is never clearly justified. This is the noir vision of justice: indistinct, partial, riddled with absurd contingencies.
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In the context of American cinematic history, Island of Doomed Men occupies a curious interstitial space. Too crude to be classic, too strange to be forgotten, it belongs to that odd class of films which render the anxieties of their age in accidental poetry.
It anticipates the paranoia of postwar noir and echoes the colonial obsessions of 1930s jungle pictures. More precisely, it stands at the crossroads between gothic domestic melodrama and prison-camp sadism. The result is an American fantasy of power and resistance, filtered through the feverish imagination of a director with no illusions and a star whose face was its own mythology.
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Peter Lorre, having fled Europe before the inferno, brought with him a particular understanding of evil. His performance here is not theatrical. He is not a stage villain, chewing lines and leering. He is something else entirely: affectless, sleepy, a man whose gestures are so minimal they become terrifying. He does not shout; he instructs.
He does not rage; he pouts. The violence he orders is worse because it is treated as banal. This is not cruelty for pleasure; this is cruelty for the sake of order.
Rochelle Hudson, too often dismissed as mere decoration, delivers a performance of striking resignation. Her Lorraine is not just a woman scorned but a woman discarded by the very world that promised her happiness. Her marriage is a sarcophagus, her husband a warden. Her every smile is a mask. In another film, she might be rescued; in this one, she simply endures.
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Wilcox, as Sheldon, is an odd cipher. He exists to be bound, beaten, and eventually triumphant. But his triumph is mechanical. He is not persuasive. He is simply persistent. This is heroism as inertia, and it lacks conviction. The real drama is between Danel and Lorraine, captor and captive, a dyad of mutual dependency and loathing.
In its aesthetic register, Island of Doomed Men skirts camp, though unintentionally. Its violence is restrained but suggestive. Whips are raised but rarely land; implications substitute for wounds. The viewer must imagine the pain, which is often more effective. This reticence, dictated by Production Code mores, lends the film a strange purity: it is brutal but bloodless, a ballet of cruelty in slow motion.
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The monkeys, curiously, may be the film's truest symbols. Danel's hatred of them is not comic; it is pathological. Monkeys remind him of something he cannot control, something that mocks his system of discipline. They are not housebroken; they are free. Their eyes do not plead. They jeer. In killing the monkey, Danel asserts his supremacy—and reveals his madness.
The ending, perfunctory and moralistic, cannot redeem the film's inner darkness. Justice is served, presumably. The island is liberated, we are told. But the island remains a symbol, and symbols cannot be dismantled with rifles. The dream persists: of power without constraint, of obedience without love.
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Island of Doomed Men deserves its place in the shadow canon of American cinema. It is imperfect, ludicrous, and profoundly revealing. In its spectacle of control and resistance, it offers not a parable but a pathology. Peter Lorre, that reluctant exile and eternal outsider, gives us not just a villain but a mirror. In his Stephen Danel, we see not just a monster, but a familiar face: ours, when we look too long at power.
No one will ever fully understand its connection to its brother companion, Island of Lost Men (1939), both of which feature distant slave encampments run by capitalistic menaces but who are both infiltrated by undercover agents, and both of whom fall foul of monkeys.
Some of the things that happen:
Stephen Danel: You ought to do something about your nervous condition, Mr. Brand. You must never talk too much. Nervous men sometimes talk too much, and they make mistakes, and you musn't make mistakes, Mr. Brand.
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Creepy hair play with Rochelle Hudson and Peter Lorre in Island of Doomed Men (1940)
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Stephen Danel: [to Capt. Cort who's about to flog Mark Sheldon, a.k.a. Mr. Smith] Don't overdo it, Captain. There's a lot Mr. Smith ought to tell me and he may want to tell me before you finish. Oh, and be sure that he's able to work tomorrow.
BEST BIT:
Stephen Danel: Keep that monkey away from me!
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Doctor Rosener: What do you plan to do about him?
Stephen Danel: What do I plan to do about him? I have many plans for Mr. Smith.
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Stephen Danel: Crying, Lorraine? Many men are whipped on this island. You've never cried before.
Stephen Danel: [speaking of Mark Sheldon] He's tall and dark and quite attractive, I suppose.
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Stephen Danel: [Unlocking the gate] One moment, gentlemen. We have no police on the island, so one has to take certain precautions.
[Mark reaches up to touch wire fencing]
Stephen Danel: Oh, I wouldn't touch those wires if I were you, Mr. Smith. There's a slight electrical current passing through them, to keep out the animals and snakes. You see the jungle comes awfully close to us here.
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Jackson: Did you ever hear of a man named Steven Danel?
Mark Sheldon: I don't think so.
Jackson: Well, Danel is our man. Lincoln freed the slaves. Mr. Danel is back in the trade and doing very well at it.
Stephen Danel: Didn't I tell you about that monkey? I'll teach you to -
[Danel shoots the monkey]
Lorraine Danel: Don't!
Stephen Danel: Throw that thing out! DIDN'T YOU HEAR ME!
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[Siggy goes to get his monkey's remains]
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Lorraine Danel: You're so brave. Against things that can't fight back.
Stephen Danel: Don't... don't make me do anything else, Lorraine. Please don't.
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Mitchell: [to Danel] You dirty slave-trading rat!
Stephen Danel: I've been away for a long time. You should be very glad to see me.
Lorraine Danel: I hate the sight of you!
Stephen Danel: I know that. Lorraine, you have been in Mr. Smith's arms. Nothing like that must ever happen again, it embarrasses me. You're my wife, and he's a murderer.
Lorraine Danel: And what are you?
Stephen Danel: I'm your husband.
[Takes a jewelry box from his pocket]
Stephen Danel: Lorraine, remember this stone?
Lorraine Danel: You can't bribe me with that!
Stephen Danel: Why should I bribe you?
Lorraine Danel: You've tried everything else and failed. No matter what you do, you'll always fail!
Stephen Danel: I've never failed and I never will fail.
Lorraine Danel: I won't wear that! You can't make me!
Stephen Danel: Of course you will.
[Puts necklace on her]
Stephen Danel: So Mr. Smith approves of my taste, huh? There's only one thing Mr. Smith doesn't know. What I own I keep. But he'll learn. So will you.
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Island of Lost Men (1940) makes it on to the List of Horror Films of the 1940s
Lorraine Danel: I've never had a chance to hear how you talk to your other prisoners. Do you mind if I stay? It might impress me.
Stephen Danel: Go to your room.
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Island of Doomed Men (1940)
Mitchell: You're wasting your time. There's only one way out of here. Make 'em kill you. Don't die... day at a time. Get it over! Then you can rest. Dead men can't work. Never... get out... till you die. Then you get paroled to a pine box.
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Stephen Danel: You'll forgive me if I don't ask you to sit down, Mr. Smith, but your clothes and my furniture... I'm sure you'll understand.
Department of Justice Official: In joining our undercover staff you'll have to burn all your bridges behind you.
Mark Sheldon: I've done that sir.
Department of Justice Official: You're joining an army. An army where there are no banners. No medals for heroism. And death is the only honourable discharge. When you walk out of that door you're starting on a lonely road. If you get into trouble, we won't help you. We'll deny that you're one of our men.
Mark Sheldon: I understand.
Department of Justice Official: Well, I hoped you wouldn't let me talk you out of it.
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This 1940 film then, the one we want to talk about, one of Noam Chomsky's least ever favourite movies, Island of Doomed Men, directed by Charles Barton and featuring Peter Lorre in a signature sinister role, is a work of lurid shadows and broken logic, a perverse echo of American anxiety dressed in B-movie regalia.
Ya ya! Despite its promise of pulp excitement and sadistic melodrama, it offers instead an erratic patchwork of implausible plotting and squandered menace. At the same time I personally find a lot of sadistic excitement in the whipping, and all the implausible plotting is permissible, like everything pre-World War 2.
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A product of Columbia Pictures' factory-like output of low-budget thrillers, the film teeters on the edge of delirium, yet never quite submits to the nightmarish excess it so clearly courts.
Stephen Danel, a soft-spoken tyrant played by Lorre, operates a penal colony hidden beneath the juridical murk of a "forgotten" United States territory. Danel's scheme is wickedly simple and perversely unbelievable: he sponsors prisoners for parole, only to enslave them on his island, where they dig for diamonds beneath the lash of hired brutes.
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These men, supposedly released from prison, simply vanish into the ether of Danel's private tyranny, with no questions asked by the state, the press, or their families. The film never attempts to explain how such a glaring conspiracy eludes detection.
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The Justice Department's response to this fantastical crime? An even more ludicrous plan. Agent Mark Sheldon (Robert Wilcox), green as spring corn, is briefed by his superior, Agent #46, in a scene that plays like deadpan parody. Moments later, #46 is gunned down through an office window by a mystery assailant while delivering his final exposition.
Instead of launching a formal investigation, the agency allows Sheldon to be framed for the murder, sentenced under an alias, and jailed for a year so that he might be "paroled" into Danel's clutches. It is a plan that presumes infinite resources and limitless patience, neither of which the film convincingly attributes to the federal government or its agents.
Yet, the illogic is not merely narrative laziness; it gestures toward something more pathological. This is not a film interested in coherence. Rather, it toys with the tropes of authority, surveillance, and submission in a post-Depression, pre-war America struggling with the idea of justice.
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Peter Lorre's Danel is no cartoon sadist. Instead, he exudes a weary cruelty, refined and methodical, a gentleman trafficker in flesh and labor. Lorre, whose visage had by then become a symbol of urbane menace, carries the film on his stooped shoulders.
Every syllable he speaks is lacquered with contempt, not only for the men he enslaves but for the very notion of human dignity. His scenes with Rochelle Hudson, who plays his imprisoned wife Lorraine, border on gothic parody, yet Lorre finds a quiet malice that chills more than any grandiloquent villainy.
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Hudson, though underutilized, provides the film's most intriguing subtext. Lorraine, once a showgirl, now a hostage-wife, is a woman whose charms once afforded her social ascension but have become a trap. Her continual wardrobe changes—gowns upon gowns—are less about glamour than entrapment. She is always prepared to perform, but never to act freely. Her entrapment is as complete and unacknowledged as the men toiling in the mines.
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She is emotional currency in a closed system of violence. Her seeming lack of agency only emphasizes the structural cruelty of Danel's world. That the film makes so little of her inner life—offering her as little more than a passive observer of male struggle—exemplifies the rigid gender politics of its time.
Yet her presence is essential to decoding the film's unconscious. The story is nominally about one man liberating other men. But the more insidious violence—marital imprisonment, domestic tyranny—is never truly confronted.
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Danel does not just control Lorraine physically; he curates her reality, replacing autonomy with ornamental compliance. In this way, the film betrays a moral hierarchy in which the freedom of men matters more than the dignity of women. Her suffering is aestheticized, not resolved.
Robert Wilcox, trying valiantly to impersonate the clipped stoicism of a Dana Andrews or a Robert Mitchum, is a pallid center to the narrative chaos. His Mark Sheldon is less a character than a cipher, a stand-in for the audience's incredulity. He furrows his brow, squints into darkness, and delivers lines with a dutiful detachment.
Unlike Lorre, Wilcox is hemmed in by the absurdity of the plot. He can neither transcend it nor ground it. The attempt to render him heroic falls flat, especially as his character's plan unravels under the mildest scrutiny. He never acts like a man with training or resolve, merely someone following directions he doesn't understand.
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These stylistic choices, likely driven by budgetary limitations, align it with the economy of means seen in classic noir. The island itself is less a place than a metaphysical zone: a land of arbitrary punishment and impossible escape. The use of nighttime as narrative rhythm—where horror blooms in the absence of light—echoes the thematic obsessions of noir cinema.
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Moreover, the film's moral landscape is unrelentingly pessimistic. The government, when it acts, does so with Kafkaesque cruelty. The villain's crimes are both fantastical and bureaucratic. The hero's journey is neither redemptive nor illuminating.
These are noir values, even if the trappings lean toward gothic melodrama. The story may end with Danel defeated, but there is no victory, only release.
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In the wider history of American cinema, Island of Doomed Men serves as a transitional text. It lacks the polish of prestige pictures, but it is saturated with the unease of a nation edging toward global conflict. In the year of its release, America was still publicly neutral, yet the war's specter loomed large. Domestically, Roosevelt had just won an unprecedented third term.
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Abroad, democracy appeared on the brink of extinction. Danel's island functions as a microcosm of authoritarian rot—a reminder that evil often thrives not in the chaos of rebellion but under the guise of order.
This paranoid architecture—of secret power and false identities—mirrors America's own anxieties about its institutions. The penal system becomes complicit in Danel's empire. The Justice Department, too, appears more invested in spectacle than salvation. There is no moral centre to this world. Only Lorre, curled like a dark flame, gives it any heat.
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The supporting cast, including Charles Middleton as the brutish Captain Cort and George E. Stone as the ill-fated cook Siggy, exist more as functions than people. Siggy’s relationship with his monkey, culminating in the monkey's death at Danel's hands, is one of the few moments the film achieves genuine pathos.
That such a moment involves a taxidermied animal prop speaks to the film’s tonal disarray. Yet, even this absurdity adds to the sense that everything on Danel's island is a performance of normalcy gone sour.
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And it is a performance. The island is rigged like a stage, its props electrified fences, diamond mines, velvet gowns. Every scene feels hermetically sealed from logic, but not from affect. The emotional tenor is one of exhausted submission. Even the violence is weary. Danel does not whip his prisoners himself—he delegates. He barely watches. His sadism is corporate, bureaucratic. This detachment makes him more terrifying.
As a genre specimen, the film operates in the interstice between horror, noir, and melodrama. It resists coherence not by accident, but because it is expressing incoherence itself. The moral absurdity of its universe is matched only by the narrative absurdity of its plot. That it continues at all—without collapse—is a strange triumph.
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| Island of Doomed Men (1940) |
But it is a satellite of genre, drawn into our orbit by its fatalism, its shadows, its unyielding sense of moral decay. It is a film about enslavement masquerading as rescue, about law functioning as crime. It is a vision of America as dreamt by a man who has stopped believing in it.
What remains is Peter Lorre. Soft-spoken, nearly somnambulant, but always watching. He does not need to rage. He whispers, and the world rearranges itself to obey.
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Island of Doomed Men (1940)
Directed by Charles Barton
Genres - Crime, Drama, Thriller | Release Date - May 20, 1940 | Run Time - 68 min. | Wikipedia
