User Reviews

PRISONER OF JAPAN is a typical WW2 B-movie of the 1940s. It's low budget and dated, and yet it passes the time amiably enough and features some spy-themed hijinks between American and Japanese agents on a Pacific island. The cast was unknown to me but the writer/director is none other than Edgar G. Ulmer, who made the excellent BLACK CAT in 1935. PRISONER OF JAPAN isn't anywhere near the quality of that classic, but it's an acceptable potboiler regardless.

On the tropical island of Nukuloa the owner David Bowman is held prisoner by the Japanese who are using the location for the secret tracking of American convoys and naval vessels. Bowman is a conscientious objector on the island to get away from it all but the war situation forces him to make a stand when several people are killed. Unfortunately Bowman is played by Alan Baxter, who is unconvincing playing a tortured soul.

With a stronger male lead this would have been fine. Gertrude Michael is excellent as Toni Chase who comes to the island looking for Bowman and she is moving in her last scenes in the bombed out bunker awaiting her fate. The editing is surprisingly good for a low budget film with some telling cross cutting of sound and vision.

It could have been a better film but it's not bad.

Allan Baxter is the central figure, the young son of a great astronomer. Baxter, now debauched, hangs around on an island in the South Pacific, gazes at the stars and the moon through his first-class telescope, and drinks bourbon. Yes, a wastrel. One of those ne'er-do-well sons.

The island is Nukuloa, which is supposed to be fictional, but there really is a Nukuloa, part of the Wallis Island chain near Fiji. The Japanese never got near it. There's a reference to Baxter's being like "any other drifter in Pago Pago," but Pago Pago is far away in Samoa. Okay, I'll quit with the trivia.

Frankly, there are times when Baxter actually does seem strung out on something. He's slow, deliberate in his movements and his diction. He seems to have been captured in slow motion and has been given little of interest to say. It's too bad because he was so damned good as the villain who tells Robert Cummings that he's going to raise his son with long golden curls, in Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur." The chief heavy is Ernst Deutsch. He's a genuine German with a genuine German name and a genuine German accent, but he plays a Japanese sneak named Matsuru. Well, covered up with thick glasses and a mustache, you can't really tell, and anyway in 1942 the enemies were interchangeable.

The dialog has a few tropes of interest. "Your patriotism is useless, like a bird flapping its wings inside a cage." Otherwise the dialog is admirably dull and driven by exposition. That quote comes from Deutsch, who is explaining to Baxter why he, Baxter, is so mixed up. The analysis is concise but it's unnecessary because we already KNOW why Baxter is so vervirrt. A better writer and director would have taken that into account. It's the kind of dialog that slackens the pace of the picture, and it definitely needs more verve. I mean, there are about three small sets. The whole thing comes across as a carelessly written and acted stage play.

I've kind of skipped the plot because it's B-movie routine. But the movie itself is a good historical example of the string that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. Says Baxter: "I HATE war and everything it stands for!" Replies his chipper girl friend, "But you've GOT to fight. Everybody's got to fight." Typically, the early war movies were full of patriotism and heroics. After a few years, there was less moral messaging and more realism. By 1945, when the war ended, it was no longer necessary to tell the audience why we should fight. It was implicit in stories of men sloshing through the mud and cursing one another instead of the enemy.

The copy I saw was dark and hard to see, esp. since most of the action takes place at night. I actually thought the script and plot had some original angles. I mean within the first 5 minutes a sailor is describing how radio signals bounce off the Heaviside Layer to his dinner hostess. That plus the fact that two of the three major protagonists are astronomers is pretty unique I think!

But don't get your hopes too high, this is no A picture and it was produced soon after Pearl Harbor by the look of it. Back when there were no real US victories to celebrate and the characters are prone to die suicidally. (Think Robert Taylor in "Bataan" and Alan Ladd in "China").

I've seen far worse than this and I thought the main characters did a nice job, especially Gertrude Mitchell as the dance hall girl turned hero. Also watch out for Corinna Muri from "Casablanca". That may even be the same guitar she's playing!

We expect much more of cult directors Arthur Ripley and Edgar G. Ulmer than this cheap-jack keep-the-flag flying item which is as poorly acted and scripted as it is bottom-of-the-barrel produced. And along with the movie's sparse production values, it's hard to separate who gives the worst performance. Almost everyone in the cast lacks charisma, but I guess the hammiest is German actor Ernest Dorian. Admittedly, he is given lines that would stump even Humphrey Bogart, but Dorian is also hindered by his mind-boggling casting as a Japanese infiltrator rather than a German spy! Alan Baxter is not much of a hero either, but it is a real shame to find a talented and normally charismatic player like Gertrude Michael cast as the heroine in this cheap-jack, dismal "D"- grade production. Available on a just-watchable Alpha DVD.