Monsoon

Monsoon, better known as Isle of Forgotten Sins, was Edgar G. Ulmer's South Seas adventure movie, made with virtually no money at PRC in 1943. It was also, in some respects, Ulmer's version of a John Ford adventure movie, with John Carradine and Frank Fenton playing a pair of two-fisted divers, who, in another movie, might have been John Wayne and Victor McLaglen at the end of the 1930s. The source print is fairly clean in the early and middle reels, with some white vertical scratches on the print, but also a fair amount of detail and contrast in most of the scenes. There's been a bit too much light pumped through at times, which whites out some of the details, but otherwise, this is a better-than-decent presentation of a fascinating movie, filled with very interesting players, characters, and performances. One wishes the print were better -- from 12 minutes in, there are lots of small scratches that escalate to missing frames and some very choppy moments at the tail end of the final reel. But what's here is passable for the price, and also given the fact that there will never likely be a better version (unless Allday Entertainment, the Ulmer specialty house, releases one). The six chapters standard to Alpha's DVDs aren't really adequate to break down the somewhat involved plot of the 81-minute movie, but at least the simple menu is, as usual, easy to use.