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| Sidney Toler and Gale Somdergaard |
Marge (Gale Sondergaard) runs a shady casino and nightclub in the islands, where she waits for her lover, Mike (John Carradine), to arrive. Mike has a love-hate friendship with Jack Burke (Frank Fenton of Lady of Burlesque), and Mike tells him where they can find three million in gold on a sunken ship in a lagoon. The two men plan to steal it away from Krogen (Sidney Toler) and his partner, Johnny Pacific (Rick Vallin), but are unaware that these two men know what Mike and Jack are planning and have their own scheme in mind. After a shooting at the club, which is called the "Isle of Forgotten Sin," Marge importunes Mike to take her and some of her shady ladies to the lagoon to avoid the prying eyes of the law. Bur there will be a lot of skulduggery and double-crosses, not to mention a climactic storm, before anyone gets their hands permanently on the gold. Isle of Forgotten Sins not only features the novelty of a rare starring role for Sondergaard [The Spider Woman Strikes Back], but also gives her an unlikely pairing with Carradine (although that's not as strange as her teaming with Andy Devine in Never Say Die). Sidney Toler, who frequently played the venerable Charlie Chan, nearly steals the show playing the kind of nasty adversary that Chan would have had fun out-witting. Veda Ann Borg is cast as Luana, the native girl who is the lover of Johnny Pacific. There are a couple of good songs sung at the club -- "Tango" and "Moon Madness" -- but most of Leo Erdody's score sounds like it was borrowed from classical themes and is hardly ever appropriate. Despite the cast and situations, Isle of Forgotten Sins only really comes alive in the final minutes, but the low-budget of a PRC production could hardly approximate a really astonishing monsoon at the end so we're left with some heavy winds and a few water-logged actors in a tank.
Verdict: Nice to see Toler and Sondergaard and a few others, but the movie is strictly minor-league. **1/2.
Sidney Toler and Gale Sondergaard! Even though you don't love it, that would be a must-see for me. As you know, Sidney was my favorite Charlie Chan, and Gale is so marvelous in The Letter...and actually signed to play a glamorous sequin-sprinkled Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz (thank God she didn't though!).
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Fascinating bit of background on the Wizard! I'm surprised poor Gale didn't get a complex the way she was so often cast as witchy type women! Her loss was Margaret Hamilton's gain. She and Toler play well together but they were both at the bottom of the barrel in this one. And John Carradine as Gale's lover!
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