And a strange film, besides. A group of fairly unpleasant criminals in a penal colony on French Guiana try to escape through the jungle and across the sea to the mainland. One of them is Clark Gable, who has had a fairly prickly encounter with tough, er, 'working girl' Joan Crawford, at her most explosive (well, that's not quite the word, but it'll do for now). And there's a strange sort of religious figure played by Ian Hunter (Come Live With Me, The Long Voyage Home, The Adventures of Robin Hood as King Richard), who's there to guide and mediate and offer advice of the soul. Gable and Crawford make it to the mainland, of course, and decide to continue their adventure together, but a storm is brewing.. and then one hour 40 into the film, the disc became one of the storm casualties, so we never find out. (A shame as it was a lovely print in the Joan Crawford Collection, volume 2, which we had only watched once, twelve years ago. Che cazzo?)
French Guiana still exists, surprisingly. It's a region above Brazil and is the home of the infamous Devil's Island.
Nicely photographed by Robert Planck (many credits since 1930), music by Franz Waxman, editor Robert Kern. Joseph Mankiewicz produced the Lawrence Hazard screenplay adaptation of Richard Sale's novel 'Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep'.
Cast includes a simply vile Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, J. Edward Bromberg, Eduardo Ciannelli.
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