The Mysterious Island

An unfortunate, fascinating, uneven, and apparently accursed film with three directors which took that same number of years to complete. The cost of this interesting failure was well over a million dollars, a staggering sum at the time. Barring underwater sequences, the entire film was shot in the old two-color Technicolor process, an expensive system which required special projection equipment in the theaters. The entire second unit was destroyed while filming on location near the Bahamas. The original director, the celebrated Tourneur, suffered artistic differences with MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg and departed when the film was half completed. He was replaced ...