People are voting emotionally.

Absolutely Fantastic

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The acting in this movie is really good.

HELL'S ISLAND was the third Karlson-Payne film project, a color noir shot in widescreen. This time the director and star were not working for independent producer Edward Small, but instead for the Pine-Thomas unit at Paramount. The somewhat larger budget given this production allowed it to be made in Technicolor and VistaVision. The story has Payne in pursuit of a stolen ruby down in the Caribbean, which causes him to cross paths with an ex-girlfriend who deals in deception. Mary Murphy plays the femme fatale; and Paul Picerni is her imprisoned husband that Payne may or may not help break out of jail. Karlson's hard-hitting direction was praised, and so were the colorful characters, and Payne's tough performance.In addition to the three film noirs they made together, Karlson and Payne would collaborate again on television. They both worked on the Studio 57 episode 'Deadline' broadcast on February 26, 1956.

A guy gets hired to find someone's ruby and some stuff happens. Sorry to be so vague, but it's a nondescript kind of movie. Very familiar scenario with the usual shadowy characters, convoluted backstory, femme fatale, double-crosses, witnesses suddenly getting killed, and so forth. It's executed well enough but has little spark. Earlier Phil Karlson directed John Payne in 99 RIVER STREET and KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL, both much more exciting and memorable films. Not that Payne is bad here, nor is the direction, it's just a meh movie. It is a joy to see Francis L. Sullivan... although he doesn't much screen time, he does have a hell of an exit scene. As for the visual style, it's a VistaVision Technicolor production... unfortunately my copy was fullscreen, faded and damaged, so I can't really comment. Worthwhile if you really need a noir fix, but pretty bland.

This is a decent film noir production. It stars John Payne in the latter portion of his career--when he was no longer a pretty-boy or light-weight singer. He was good as an angry noir hero and I certainly thought that he was up to the task. However, the plot is another story. While it's not bad, it's VERY, VERY familiar--like the writer was simply regurgitating portions of other movies he'd recently seen. In MANY ways, it's a reworking of "The Maltese Falcon" that is set in Mexico--and even has a similar sort of dame and a fat guy doing a Sidney Greenstreet imitation! It is also like several other B-movies I've seen over the years. Nothing particularly original about this one. It's got a few weaknesses (the woman is so OBVIOUSLY evil yet our hero doesn't recognize this for the longest time--even though he's a well-educated guy!) and about all you'd expect from a film of this sort--double-crosses, murders and the like. A decent time-passer but no more.

After 99 River Street and Kansas City Confidential, world-weary bruiser John Payne teams up with director Phil Karlson for Hell's Island, this time in VistaVision (Payne apparently had the foresight to see that television would become a profitable market for color films). After being jilted, Payne drank himself out of a job in the L.A. district attorney's office and now serves as bouncer in a Vegas casino. A wheelchair-bound stranger (Francis L. Sullivan) engages him to locate a ruby that disappeared in a Caribbean plane crash; the bait is that it may be in the possession of the woman (Mary Murphy) who jilted him. Payne flies off to Santo Rosario and into a web of duplicity at whose center Murphy waits (she does the "femme" better than she does the "fatale," however). There's a splendid moment when she shuts up her doors and draws the curtains on the memory of her rich busband, now in a penal colony across the subtropical waters for supposedly causing the deadly crash. The movie's texture is spun from Payne's carrying a torch that fails to illuminate the amplitude of clues and warning signals all around him. Professionally done if not especially memorable, Hell's Island remains an enjoyable color noir -- the Payne/Karlson combo rarely disappoints.