Starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, J. Carrol Naish, Robert Williams, Abner Biberman
Directed by Lew Landers

Print: black/white
Runtime: 62 min.
Genre: drama
Print Quality: B

A film that is among the umpteen hundred films that some source has given Mario
Castelnuovo-Tedesco a "credited" composers credit, although his name appears actually
nowhere in connection with the vast majority of these umpteen hundred films, and one of
four films that Tom Neal and Ann Savage were in together. This one has Robert B. Williams
as some kind of scientist on an unnamed South Pacific island and he is making penicillin
out of jungle mold at a time when penicillin was so new that all the players in the film
pronounce it as "pey-nen-sol-lon" or something like that. Tom Neal is also there as some
kind of guard or protector of Williams' work and is hacked off something fierce about it as
his goal if to get off the island and into hand-to-hand action "against the japs." Before long
an unidentified plane flies over the island and Neal has his pistol at the ready to shoot it
down in case it is an enemy plane but a figure parachutes out and in parachutes none other
than Ann Savage, who is there as Neal's replacement, although Neal now isn't as ready to
leave as he was before. Then a man, George Lynn, washes ashore and is accepted as a
crewman from a torpedoed American ship. Later, Williams is murdered, after some of his
"pey-non-sol-len or whatever" samples disappear, and Neal concludes that either Savage,
island-doctor J.Carroll Naish or Abner Biberman is the guilty party working for the Axis to
get the penicillin formula. This isn't exactly Holmes-or-Chan sleuthing on his part as he
knows he isn't guilty and the only people on the island, with the exception of three natives,
are those he names as suspects. He doesn't know that a two-man Japanese submarine
(with five or six Germans on board plus the two Japanese crewmen)is lurking offshore, but
his list of suspects is basically correct, as none of the people from the sub have come
ashore yet. Well, one has but he floated in. Discounting the floater, it doesn't take a rocket
scientist to figure out that between Savage, Naish and Biberman, which one who can least
bear scrutiny.