Serpent Island is an important film. This statement may seem confusing for those who’ve never heard of the movie, and without reasoning for those who have. Hear me out. Foremost, as far as I can tell, it’s the first made-for-TV movie. I mean, I’m not staking my life on the veracity of this, but I’ve not found an earlier example of a narrative film produced exclusively for television. Alvin H. Marill’s multi-volume Movies Made for Television, marks the starting point as NBC’s See How They Run from 1964, which Serpent Island beats by a full decade. If it turns out there is a title I’m missing, then perhaps Serpent Island is merely the first made-for-TV movie in color. In case it’s not a “first” anything, I think everyone can agree that Serpent Island is, at the very least, a fascinating curio. It’s a threadbare 1954 adventure yarn with a voodoo twist, starring a Hollywood has-been, made just for the boob tube. In my estimation, that qualifies it as “important.”
Note that I never said it was a great film. A week after its premiere, The Cincinnati Enquirer commented on this historic moment in cinema history, “Channel 9 better quit calling its Sunday night films “Million Dollar Movies” if it comes up with any more offerings like Serpent Island, the low-budget dog it featured last weekend…”
Rotten journalists couldn’t identify a pivotal moment in history if it smacked them in the face.
Serpent Island was shown far and wide and long. The earliest transmission I could find was January 2nd, 1955, on the Wichita, Kansas station KEDD. From there, it was like a single film print was passed along from one station to the next. Kansas to Tennessee, from Tennessee to Minnesota. In February, it was shown in Connecticut, in March it was in Rochester, New York. In June, the movie was playing California markets, with one newspaper describing it as, “…a brand spanking new color feature not yet released to the public in theatres…” (The film never played in theaters.)
The Serpent Island TV tour continued non-stop throughout 1956 and 1957, showing in every city from New York, New York to Owensboro, Kentucky. After three years of non-stop showings, it just kept going, albeit at a slower pace, for the next several decades. Chicagoans caught a late night showing after Carol Reed’s The Man Between in April of 1962. If you could somehow steal the TV from mom, there was a chance to see it at 3:00 PM in New Jersey in the Summer of 1974. If you tuned in at midnight on a Saturday in July 1987 in Albuquerque, there was a sweaty Sonny Tufts in Serpent Island. If you were in Toronto on the evening of October 5th, 1991, and fell asleep watching Hairspray, then the sounds of Serpent Island may have invaded your dreams at 3:45 AM.
Or maybe in the 90s you bought Serpent Island on VHS from Rhino Home Video’s Acme Video label. (Serpent Island scored a justifiably low “Goose Bumps” on Acme’s proprietary Fright Factor. For comparison’s sake, Corman’s The Wasp Woman rated as “Bone Chilling.”)
This just goes to show how far you can get with an eye-catching title and a familiar face. “Serpent Island” sounds cool, and the name Sonny Tufts conjures his 1940s G.I. Joe image. In actuality, Tufts was at the lowest ebb of his career: divorced, soused, and freshly accused by two separate strippers of biting their thighs (!).
Alas, nothing so surprising as a bite on the thigh occurs in Serpent Island.
Ricki André (Mary Munday in her first credited role) is the great-granddaughter of a notorious French aristocrat killed in the Haitian revolution. André charters a boat and hires Pete Mason (Tufts), a Southern Californian “harbor tramp” who is familiar with Haiti, to locate her great-grandfather’s hidden treasure. The captain of the boat is Kirk Ellis (Republic stock player Tom Monroe), a taskmaster with his eye on André and the treasure.
All the expected elements are present: jaded narration from Tufts, sexual tension, fisticuffs, mismatched stock footage, sex on the beach intercut with shots of crashing waves, jungle drums, a scary native (former professional wrestler, Don Blackman), a shark attack, and, more importantly, a climactic python attack. This all takes place in 62 minutes—plenty of room for commercials.
Mr. BIG himself, Bert I. Gordon, received his first film credits on this picture as the producer, editor, and cinematographer. The best that can be said of Gordon’s work is the film was very definitely produced and assembled, and what’s happening on-screen is mostly visible. It’s not clear how the film was originally shot, but the prints supplied to TV stations were 16mm Kodachrome, which tends to have murky shadows. I will give the cinematography the benefit of the doubt, but with the further degradation of a transfer to VHS, what I viewed is not impressive.
Like Gordon, writer/director Tom Gries did go on to bigger and better things, including a plethora of TV credits and a string of feature films starting in the late 1960s, such as Will Penny with Charlton Heston and Breakheart Pass with Charles Bronson. Even with those more respectable projects under his belt, Serpent Island must have remained an important chapter of his life, if for no other reason than Gries married the star, Mary Munday. They had three children together, who all ended up having successful careers in Hollywood, perhaps most famously Jon Gries, who played Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite.
See, I told you Serpent Island is important.
Poor Tom Gries! Doesn't even get credit on the Rhino video box.