Island of Desire – 1951

A flawed movie with very nice color photography

The script (by director Stuart Heisler and Stephanie Nordli) has a few witty moments:

Linda Darnell: Dugan, I really wanted to help, but I was terrified. You've never been afraid, have you?

Tab Hunter: Sister, the only thing that scares the tar out of me is you.

Mild ironic statements aside, Island of Desire (titled Saturday Island in the UK release) is a melodrama about the problem of two people trapped together on a deserted island. It's a tale that's been explored in a whole sub-genre of Hollywood movies, chiefly built around the original 1949 and subsequent remakes of The Blue Lagoon. There are variations on the theme like the 1957 Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, and an inversion of that with Hell in the Pacific (1968), but the idea of island romance and abandonment on an island goes backward through literature through Robinson Crusoe (1719), Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611) and much older tales like Ulyssey's problems on two different Mediteranean islands in The Odyssey (approx. 700 BC).

In Island of Desire, Tab Hunter plays a U.S. marine and Linda Darnell a highly-skilled veteran combat nurse aboard a busy hospital ship during World War II. The ship strikes a mine and goes up in flames, Tab cuts loose a life raft and gets aboard it, calling out for any other survivors amid the wreckage, and Linda is the only one to respond. They drift aimlessly on the ocean and eventually come to an island abandoned by the native population (and why they did so is a slender little sub-story that gets some marginal attention as the movie unreels).

Tab's character is elated with the gorgeous island, Darnell's less so, particularly after they find a wrecked sail boat (Tab yells out "Hey, White Guy's stuff!" when he spots it wedged into the rocks on the island shore). They pore through the boat's contents and discover the owner's skeleton on a bunk, a bullet through his head, and all the material on board seems to date to 1930:

Linda: It makes me realize, I'm stuck here. There won't be any planes or ships. We'll never be found. Will we!

Tab: We might be.

Linda: Did he shoot himself because the traffic was so heavy?

Tab: I don't know yet. I sure don't get it. It's a terrific island: it's got everything.

Linda: Oh, of course, a regular paradise! He had everything a man could possible want. Not a care in the world. Free groceries, no rent, no taxes, no wars. Nothing.

Though featuring an A-list star (Linda Darnell), costly Technicolor photography, and though this tale is told in an effective way at times, Island of Desire has an amateurish quality that keeps cropping up. Special effect sequences (bad weather, some of the stunt work) is edited so tightly that it seems like in a few places there simply isn't any footage to explain what's happening on screen except in a very fleeting way.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this "A" film is that in the first third of the tale the music comes crashing into the story like the sound track of a 1930's movie serial where every action and mood has to be enunciated by an overactive orchestra pounding away, but finally the composer lost some energy and things calm down to let the dialogue through.

There is also that this is one of Tab Hunter's first film roles and this shows up in many of his scenes. Once our pair of actors Darnell and Hunter are isolated onto the island, the pacing finally settles into telling the tale and calmly moving forward and Hunter's acting chops seem to improve right along with the story. Though the pair have been bickering and arguing the whole time since they'd met, they begin to, shall we say, bond. It is a tortuous process for Tab Hunter's character and he commences to doing a "you're tearing me apart!" style of naturalistic expression that predates James Dean and the whole wave of 1950's method acting, though a less charitable view of this would be to say Hunter can't control his stylization and is expressing emotional repression as a form of clenched and hunched physical impactation.

The script makes sure we understand there is an "unsaid" tension between the two. Tab Hunter's young man, formerly so overjoyed with the island that he was convinced is a paradise, has now become miserable, telling the nurse "You got me talking to myself. You don't want to know what I think about, or how I feel!" The issue between them in Hollywood terms is sex, but in the script it is that there is a huge but not clearly defined age difference between the two. The cinematic problem (which is unintentionally hilarious at times) is that Tab Hunter looks all of the muscular 19 years old he literally was during the filming, and Linda Darnell's character may say she's "an old maid, only fit to be ignored" in the dialogue, but we're watching documentary proof simultaneously that Darnell is at best only the actual 27 years of age she was when she made this movie, and on top of that, well, she looks like a gorgeous young Linda Darnell.

The implausibilities mount when a British fighter plane pilot (Donald Grey) crash lands on the island, and, injured badly, has to have his arm amputated. This is easy enough for the experienced nurse, and the pilot recuperates quickly. But, now we've got three people on the island and two of them have overwhelming infatuations for Linda Darnell. It will take the British navy to solve this problem (they arrive just in time!)

The South Pacific location is beautiful though really a facsimile: we're looking at Jamaican palms and beaches. Tab Hunter climbs up and down rocks and palms and the huts that he builds like an energetic teenager, and Darnell weaves clothing from palm fronds that somehow become a rather elaborate wardrobe as the minutes roll by.

Donald Gray doesn't need to pretend to be missing an arm because there's no special effects here, though the director (Stuart Heisler) usually tries to hide the wound from direct visual inspection. Gray actually lost his left arm to the Germans while fighting in Europe in 1944, something which brings up an odd situation in the film: he can still outfight Tab Hunter's marine in a third act tussle over Darnell.

Darnell performs fine, and Tab Hunter is not exactly refined in Island of Desire, but if you are in the mood to cut the film some slack, something that comes in handy for the sizeable catalogue of films that are somehow over-polished and under-polished at the same time, Island of Desire has it's moments. The photography is very good and the island looks beautiful.

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