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(1929) Lionel Barrymore, Jacqueline Gadsdon, Lloyd Hughes, Montagu Love, Harry Cribbon. This wonderful 2-disc edition includes both a color edition (important message and update below) as well as the more common B&W edition of this classic film. Loosely based on Verne’s famous novel, Barrymore plays Count Dakkar, a scientist and leader of a scientific colony on a remote volcanic island (In Verne’s original novels he would become Captain Nemo). He has built two fantastic submarines that can reach depths never before reached. But he and his stalwart assistant (Hughes) and beautiful daughter (Gadsdon) are betrayed by the power-mad Baron Falon, expertly portrayed by the deliciously sinister Montagu Love. When Love’s men overrun the island, the principal players soon find themselves sinking into unheard-of depths in Barrymore’s two futuristic submarines. On the ocean bottom, a desperate battle ensues between the submarines and a fantastic race of underwater humanoid creatures. There are also a number of enormous monsters, including a giant squid. The Mysterious Island, which is a part talkie-part silent film, is an early science fiction classic. This is a great movie. The special effects, for the time, are truly amazing. The sets are incredible, especially the enormous yet intricate interiors of the submarines. The volcanic island is a thing to behold. MGM put a lot of money into this one—well over a million, which was an amazing sum for those times. Angelo Rossito has a small bit as an underwater creature. PLEASE NOTE (updated): When we originally decided to come out with MYSTERIOUS ISLAND it was going to be the B&W version only. When I was in the process of preparing our video master I wondered if there might be a trailer available to the film that we could include. One of the best sources for obscure trailers is YouTube, so I did a quick search of the YouTube website. What I found was a video of the color version. The post of this version, as I recall, said (in so many words) that it was taken from an existing 2-strip Technicolor print rediscovered in a foreign archive a number of years ago. The video quality was pretty good so I thought, what the heck, we'll include both versions of the film with our release. After all, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND is fully in the public domain now and I thought it would be a nice extra for our customers. Soon after our release of this title, a couple of my old pals in the film history community contacted me to inquire about our color version, which they were surprised to hear of. Even though I've been in the business of selling vintage science fiction and horror films for decades, I wasn't really aware of the rarity of the color version. So I went back to check the post on YouTube and voila! That post had been taken down (go figure). However, there was another YouTube upload of the film that appeared to be from a Spanish source. In the comments section of this upload it mentioned that this was indeed the original 2-strip Technicolor edition, a print of which was rediscovered in 2013. However, after sharing our video with a number of different film historians and conferring with a few others, the concensus seems to be that this version is likely an AI-color version. Regardless, we went through this print and cleaned up various color-related problems and now our video edition, I feel, looks pretty decent. But hopefully the original 2-strip Technicolor version will surface someday. In the meantime, enjoy this reasonable facsimile! --Thanks, Greg Luce, Sinister Cinema
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