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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: 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, so 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 is another YouTube upload of the film that appears to be from a Spanish source. Although I'm not certain, it's possible it may be from the same video source as our version. In the comments section of this upload it's mentioned that this is indeed the original 2-strip Technicolor edition, a print of which was rediscovered in 2013. Furthermore, it was recently suggested that our edition was from an AI recreation of the color version. However, if our version is from an AI source (which I have no means of producing myself) this would have to be considered a very poor effort, as the print clearly has the anomalies one would associate with an ancient color film print from 1929: an overwhelmingly green shading throughout (which was obviously not the intention of the original filmmakers), color bleed-through, color smearing (especially in the inter-titles), etc, as well as the general lesser vibrant look that 2-strip Technicolor had when compared to the much richer 3-strip process. For our part we tried to clean up these color-related problems and our video edition, I feel, looks considerably better. So as far as we know, our version is indeed from an original 2-strip Technicolor print. If anyone has legitimate information (key word here, "legitimate") to the contrary please contact us and we'll look into it. In the meantime, enjoy the film! --Greg Luce, Sinister Cinema UPDATE: We've sent our edition out to several film historians for their opinion on whether this is a transfer from an original 35mm color print, or an AI generated colorized edition. We'll let you know what the consensus is. --Greg.
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