The final film from the legendary director (Jet Pilot was started earlier but released later) at first seems an unlikely choice: made for a Japanese studio with Japanese actors but with von Sternberg himself providing the narration & dialogue in English. Based on historical fact, the story concerns sailors shipwrecked on the small island of Anatahan during WWII. But when it’s discovered a man & woman already inhabit the remote locale, the battle-weary & sex-starved soldiers start to disobey their commander’s orders.
“If the material is fascinating, the treatment is just amazing. Sternberg respects what’s known of the historical truth, but uses it as a point of entry to darker, more dangerous areas. Sequences of dream-like abstraction and images of staggering beauty are recognizably the work of the man who created the image of Marlene Dietrich, but here they go way beyond Hollywood evasions and compromises. The film works subversively by implicating its audience in the patterns of desire and violence, discipline and surrender. It’s brilliant.” – Time Out
