Imitation of strife

Miles away from the intense and claustrophobic worlds he helped to create for Body and Soul (1947), Johnny O’Clock (1947), All the King’s Men (1949), and The Hustler (1961), Robert Rossen’s Island in the Sun (1957, new on DVD) is a Caribbean soap opera making an obvious bid for profundity. That it fails so terribly has less to do with Rossen than the guy whose name is above the title, producer Darryl F. Zanuck. One of the last moguls left from the studio system, Zanuck was a blustery man with simple tastes. Though he recognized the box office potential of the torrid interracial sex circulating through the Alec Waugh novel the film was based on, he was also wary of scaring off less liberal-minded paying customers.

    Shot in CinemaScope and on location, with an all-star cast that includes James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, Dorothy Dandridge, Joan Collins, and Michael ‘Klaatu’ Rennie, Island in the Sun teases with the promise of ‘jungle fever’ but pulls back before anyone has time to blush. All in all, the pairings seem a tad strained, if not downright odd: Belafonte with the older, spinsterish Fontaine, and Dandridge with the older and visibly withered John Justin (once so dashing in Michael Powell’s Thief of Baghdad [1940]). That no one gets to kiss on camera was a concession to a scissor-happy censor intolerant of ‘mixed blood.’

Dorothy Dandridge

    Back-stories that may have worked to flesh out the novel appear as superfluous padding on the screen. Indeed, it often feels like there are three movies going on at once. A middle-aged man gagging on his silver spoon, Mason’s unpleasant poor little rich boy becomes embroiled in a Dostoevskian nightmare that’s explained by the island’s chief constable (played by John Williams) in a verbal recounting of the plot of Crime and Punishment. At the same time, Mason, a descendant in a long line of white supremacists, runs in a local election against the ‘colored nobility’ of Belafonte’s working class hero. I’m not sure what the public’s reaction was back in 1957, but there’s a ring of fascism in Belafonte’s diatribe which could have branched off into a very different (and far more interesting) picture.

    Paralyzed by conservative morality, Island in the Sun squanders the opportunity for glossy schlock. Despite all the panting libidos working overtime (lest we forget, Joan Collins’s single socialite gets knocked up by Stephen Boyd, fumbling graciously with his British accent), there’s nary a hint of titillation. Dorothy Dandridge, taking this thankless assignment in between Carmen Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959), is criminally underserved and overdressed…even in a limbo dance that should have had the thermometers popping. Nevertheless, that’s the image Zanuck used to sell the picture.

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