After the formula is stolen, the adventure changes to boat and plane chases to Kosloff's
secret island castle somewhere off the coast of California. The castle has a dungeon,
secret passageways, and a laboratory full of weird equipment with a giant crocodile
skeleton hanging from the ceiling. There's spiked walls to crush people, chandeliers to
swing from, and tall stairways to jump off.
What would I change? This chapter play only has ten chapters, but each of them is rather
long, so the wait between stunts/excitement grows a little tiresome. This is compounded
by the fact that the audience has to read the dialog. Luckliy, though, unlike some silent
films that I've seen, the actors don't spend a lot of time trying to mouth what we've just read.
But this movie could be edited down a bit. Along these lines, and --even though I like the
feature--it further slow things down to reintroduce each of the characters (and actors) each
time they first appear in a new chapter.
Oddly missing are… guns. The criminals are rather pleasant and well-mannered. A few
of them even feel remorse and reform before the end of the movie. The only gun that I can
recall seeing belonged to a policeman, and, like the many cigars in the movie, it produced
a copious amount of smoke. I guess when you don't have sound, you have to rely more on
the visual to help tell the story.
