best movie i've ever seen.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The history surrounding director William Clemens's "Devil's Island" emerges as far more interesting than the 62-minute Boris Karloff film itself. Initially, Warner Brothers had hoped to follow up an earlier movie, the studio's 1937 release "The Life of Emile Zola," about the incarceration of a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French Army, who had been unfairly convicted of selling military secrets to the German Army. The Dreyfus affair instigated a spectacular scandal, too. Like all of France's high profile political prisoners, Dreyfus had been sent to the penal colony on Devil's Island. Similarly, the protagonist of Clemen's film is a French physician, Dr. Charles Gaudet (Boris Karloff of "Frankenstein"), who is convicted of treason and shipped off to Devil's Island. Gaudet does what any prisoner would attempt after he is confined to the dreaded island. He rebels against the harsh discipline, and his cohorts resort to violence that lands them in even greater trouble. Eventually, Gaudet is prevailed upon to perform surgery on the young daughter of the commandant. The prison physician Dr. Duval (Edward Keane of "The Roaring Twenties") lacks the experience in treating head injuries, while Gaudet has acquired a reputation for treating prior his imprisonment. The commandant, Colonel Armand Lucien (James Stephenson of "Beau Geste"), isn't as grateful to Gaudet for his service as his wife, Madame Lucien (Nedda Harrigan of "Scandal Sheet"), is. She believes her husband has dealt too harshly in his treatment of the doctor. She turns against him and brings about his demise as a consequence of his corruption. When Warner Brothers finally got around to making "Devil's Island" in 1938, the French government had stopped sending prisoners to the notorious prison. Back in those days, Hollywood went out of its way to accommodate foreign governments. Specifically, the Production Code Administration refused to tolerate studios that alienated any foreign country by showing their institutions in a deleterious light. Despite the prison's heinous reputation for cruelty beyond imagination, "Devil's Island" soft-pedals the punishment meted out to the prisoners. At one point, a prisoner is condemned for his rebellious activities, and he finds himself on the guillotine. Mind you, Clemens couldn't depict the awful death by beheading that execution on a guillotine involved. Similarly, Hollywood was not allowed to condemn American institutions. The only way the studios could circumvent this dictum was to alter with their narratives so the institutions and the governments that operated them could not be implicated. Instead, Devil's Island isn't the cause for the inhuman treatment of its inmates. The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the corrupt Colonel Armand Lucien, and Lucien has documented his own corruption in a notebook that Gaudet discovers. This way Hollywood could indict an individual rather than an institution. Lucien's wife goes above and the beyond the call of duty to intervene on behalf of kindly Dr. Gaudet. Interestingly enough, the circumstances that culminated in the arrest and imprisonment of Gaudet have parallels in the case of another physician, Dr. Samuel Mudd, who encountered Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth when the latter sought medical treatment for an injured leg. Mudd knew nothing about Booth's notoriety until it was too late, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. "Devil's Island" is reminiscent of John Ford's "The Prisoner of Shark Island" (1936). The gritty depiction of "Devil's Island" paved the way for later yarns, specifically Franklin J. Schaffner's movie "Papillon" (1973) with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The description of Devil's Island and the impossibility of escape as well as the dreadful conditions are presented here for the first time. Later, Humphrey Bogart would star in a World War II movie "Passage to Marseilles," about prisoners who escaped from the camp to fight for France. Typically, Karloff movies delivered shivers, but "Devil's Island" delivers shivers of another type. No, this isn't so much a horror movie as it is a social protest drama, a genre that Warnes Brothers had specialized in since the studio's infamous "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932) with Paul Muni. Karloff plays neither a monster nor a mad scientist here, but he is cast as a respectable doctor with a flawless background.

In the tradition of waste not at movie studios the sets made for The Life Of Emile Zola get recycled for this short B film Devil's Island. Boris Karloff steps away from the horror genre and has the lead here. We get both the courtroom and the Devil's Island sets, Jack Warner was being most economical.As cinema this film will never rank with something like Papillon or even Passage To Marseilles which Warner Brothers did a few years later. Karloff plays a doctor who does a Samuel Mudd here, treats a wounded escaping prisoner and is charged with treason and given ten years hard labor at the notorious Carribean prison.It's a harsh and corrupt regime there that commandant James Stephenson runs. Even when Karloff saves the life of his daughter it's back to hard labor for him. But he develops a friend and ally in Stephenson's wife Nedda Harrigan.The ending is rather tacked on and artificial and things get tied up too neatly to be real. But it is nice seeing Karloff not conducting any sinister experiments for a change.

This Boris Karloff movie was very entertaining though it seemed strongly inspired by the earlier film, THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND since there were so many similarities between the two movies. SHARK ISLAND is an account of the real life man, Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was sentenced to a harsh American prison in the Tortugas after he gave medical treatment to a fleeing John Wilkes Booth. Whether or not Mudd knew that Booth had just killed the President is debatable--especially since word of the assassination may not have reached Mudd's home in rural Maryland.In much the same way, Boris Karloff plays a doctor who attends to a seriously injured man. Although Karloff knows the man was guilty, as a doctor he'd taken an oath to heal and couldn't just let the man die. As a result of his kindness, he's arrested and sent to Devil's Island, where he is abused and treated like an animal. What happens next you'll have to see for yourself, but I was very impressed by this simple film that wasn't really a horror film but a film about the human spirit and justice. Karloff, in particular, did a nice job in his role as the hapless doctor, though the script was also very good--making the viewer really care about these men in prison.The only negative, and it's a small one, is the prologue. Because the war in Europe was just beginning, the producers wished to distance themselves from condemning this French institution and so they tacked on a nice prologue saying that this film didn't represent the French people of today. This seemed rather unnecessary, as other prison films don't have similar introductions.

DEVIL'S ISLAND proved an interesting change-of-pace for Karloff but one which, I agree, is hampered by its second-feature status: as it stands, potentially controversial issues like miscarriage of justice, as well as prison brutality and corruption, are not dealt with in much detail and the expected showdown between Karloff and the callous warden (James Stephenson, who would die only 2 years later and whose best role was his Oscar-nominated turn in William Wyler's THE LETTER [1940]) never occurs. Instead, we're made to believe that the warden's wife is so grateful for ex-brain surgeon Karloff's having saved their daughter's life that she is perfectly willing to see her husband's ruined by reporting his mistreatment of the prisoners to higher authority - when, prior to the girl's accident, she didn't seem to bother much with them since she used to frequently ride up to the labor camp, in her finest attire, as if going on a Sunday picnic! A brave and well-made B-movie all around but, ultimately, it doesn't really tread new ground and certainly doesn't carry the sheer emotional power of I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932).