The 1920s and 1930s saw a fascination with the French state’s masculine extremes, with films exploring the romanticized French Foreign Legion and the notorious penal colony of Devil’s Island. Both attracted society’s cast-offs. Adventurers and men on the run seeking escape and anonymity were offered a haven by the Legion. In stark contrast, Devil’s Island was the destination of despair, reserved for serious criminals deported from France for years of hard labor with little likelihood of return.
Devil’s Island was infamous for its harsh treatment of prisoners, the staggering mortality rate from tropical diseases (half the prisoners died in their first year), and the provision of the law that required prisoners to remain on the island after release for a period equivalent to their original sentence. Beyond the cruelty, the French penal system had a strategic purpose. Modeled after Britain’s transportation of convicts to Australia, it removed criminals from France and supplied the colonies with a needed workforce. For a select few survivors, there was even the distant possibility of release and a chance to settle as colonists.
Devil’s Island gained worldwide notoriety because of the Dreyfus Affair. When French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 and imprisoned on the island, the miscarriage of justice sparked an international outcry. Press coverage and campaigns by intellectuals like Émile Zola fueled public pressure, leading to Dreyfus’s return, retrial, and eventual pardon.
American awareness of Devil’s Island was further amplified by the daring accounts of travel writer and explorer Blair Niles. A cofounder of the Society of Woman Geographers, Niles was granted access to all the prisons of French Guiana, leading to her exposés in the New York Times in 1927. Her acclaimed book, Condemned to Devil’s Island, was released in 1928 just as The Red Mark reached theaters. The timing was fortuitous, as Niles’s work resonated with an audience already captivated by the island’s grim reputation. The following year her book was adapted into the Samuel Goldwyn film Condemned starring Ronald Colman.
The Red Mark fits comfortably within the genre of films about Devil’s Island, just one part of the French penal colony in French Guiana. The original story by adventure writer John Russell takes place at the other French forced labor prison system, in the French archipelago of New Caledonia, nine hundred miles east of Australia. The film is set on the island of Koumea, mirroring the name of the actual New Caledonian capital of Nouméa and described in an intertitle as “a convict colony, where eight thousand felons—thieves, assassins—bear their daily load in bitterness and fear.”
Pathé Exchange, the distributor of The Red Mark, also released one or two big-budget pictures each year from Cecil B. DeMille’s production unit. Director James Cruze was briefly one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood, but along with DeMille had seen his star dim in the late 1920s. Just a few years before as a contract director at Paramount, Cruze was assigned a modest western that showed exceptional promise and emerged as the hugely successful The Covered Wagon (1923). The film was initially presented as a road show event, playing fifty-nine weeks in New York, and it reshaped the industry’s approach to epic filmmaking.
Cruze seemed the natural choice for another Paramount epic, Old Ironsides (1926), and, in the summer of 1926, the footage looked so promising that Paramount signed him to a new contract at $3,500 a week. Tragedy struck during the Catalina Island location shoot when a planned ship explosion went awry, killing two extras and injuring many more. Cruze was blamed, while the press was told that some extras were injured when a mast snapped during a heavy swell. Lawsuits followed, and Paramount suspended his contract.
Resilient as ever, Cruze formed his own production company backed by Pathé Exchange. Eager to become a major player, Pathé had absorbed Cecil B. DeMille’s Culver City studio in May 1927 and then partnered with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of mostly vaudeville theaters. Unfortunately, Cruze’s Pathé debut, On to Reno (1927), a mild comedy-drama with Marie Prevost, made little impression.
Cruze’s directorial style lacked spark and originality, and his films often depended heavily on the quality of the script, his cameraman, and the experience of his actors. Louise Brooks, who worked with him in 1927 on The City Gone Wild, told Kevin Brownlow that the director “almost never talked and he drank from morning till night.” Thankfully, The Red Mark benefited from a strong foundation in John Russell’s short story first published in 1919. Scriptwriter Julien Josephson skillfully adapted the dialogue-heavy story into a tighter, more visually compelling narrative. Cruze’s selection of Ira Morgan, a veteran of seven features with Marion Davies and known for his adept photography of women, further enhanced the film’s visual quality.
While not quite Poverty Row, Pathé’s tight budgets meant The Red Mark was produced at half the cost of Cruze’s Paramount films. To cast the lead female character of Zelie, Cruze viewed more than a hundred screen tests, choosing seventeen-year-old newcomer Nena Quartaro (in later films billed as Nina Quartero). The novice actress was given the usual publicity buildup, but Photoplay was not convinced: “she combines the eyes of an Olive Borden; something of the wistfulness of a Janet Gaynor; the ‘IT’ possibilities of Clara—but all underdeveloped.” Gaston Glass, usually cast in supporting roles, was selected for the male lead of Bibi-Ri, a newly released, unreformed pickpocket. The film’s most compelling performance came from stage and screen veteran Gustav von Seyffertitz, as the penal colony’s corrupt governor. His nuanced portrayal of the villain outshone the rest of the cast, throwing the final film somewhat off balance. Experienced players filled the other roles, including Rose Dione as Mother Caron, a longtime prisoner and Zelie’s aunt, and Eugene Pallette as a jovial barber and Bibi-Ri’s friend.
The filming of The Red Mark began in late October 1927 amid the bustle of DeMille’s third season of independent production at the Culver City studio with six pictures in preparation, four in production, and another three in the cutting rooms. The Red Mark adhered to a strict twenty-four-day schedule and a final cost of $194,153. Cruze’s salary of $35,000 was the largest single expense, exceeding the combined cost of all other actors, extras, musicians, and animals ($24,538).
After The Red Mark’s release in August 1928, Harrison’s Reports, a publication aimed at exhibitors, wrote that the film was “excellently produced, but too gruesome.” The result was too intense for general audiences, editor P.S. Harrison believed, while acknowledging “it is no doubt more suitable for little theatres, where ‘odd’ kinds of pictures are shown.” Lack of interest in the setting and situations in The Red Mark proved a major hurdle in rural areas, with one Mississippi exhibitor reporting: “Well, I guess this must be a big town picture, as my patrons said to me it was out of their reach of understanding … it may be a great picture in the right theatre.” But the consensus opinion was expressed by the manager of the Palace Theatre in Malta, Montana (population: 1,342), who bluntly stated: “The steady tramp of feet toward the exit doors during this show proved that I had been slipped another lemon.”
Despite the mixed reception, Cruze continued working. He made three minor films at MGM, followed by stints at near-Poverty Row studios, Sono Art-World Wide Pictures and Tiffany. He freelanced for the rest of his career, making minor films at major studios with one notable exception: Universal’s costly flop Sutter’s Gold (1936), starring Edward Arnold. Cruze finished out his career at Republic Pictures.
Pathé Exchange itself didn’t last much longer after The Red Mark. The studio ceased production in early 1931, and its film library of negatives and stories was sold to Columbia Pictures in 1935 for $44,000. No elements of The Red Mark were included in the Columbia Pictures donation of its nitrate film library to the Library of Congress (LOC) in 1971. However, the American Film Institute’s fortunate acquisition of a nitrate print from collector Donald Nichol in 1972 saved the film. LOC archivists eagerly awaited the expiration of the film’s copyright in January of this year to join with SFSFF to share this rediscovery with new audiences.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra