Watch Sinners in Paradise For Free

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Middling B movie, directed by James Whale, about a group of people whose plane crashes on an island. Living on the island is a mysterious American with an ebullient man servant. He smokes a pipe and acts like a jerk, so of course he's the hero of the piece. He's played by that great bore John Boles, whose most famous role was in James Whales' Frankenstein. In the time between that film and this, Boles appears to have transmogrified into Laird Cregar. Starts off feeling like it's going to be a breezy comedy but, after the plane crashes, it turns into an uninvolving drama with a dash of social commentary. Aside from Boles, the cast is a talented lot and the director is, of course, capable of better things. But somehow this is just another run of the mill programmer with little to recommend about it. If you can't make a movie with Gene Lockhart, Bruce Cabot, Madge Evans, and Marion Martin work, I just don't know what to say. Worth a look for Whale completists and anyone who likes their movies to have a serial-style action scene every ten or fifteen minutes, complete with rousing score.

Getting set to write my 800th IMDb review,I decided to search around on Amazon UK for titles by directing auteur James Whale.Getting near the end of the listings for his famous Horror movies,I was surprised to stumble upon a near-forgotten Adventure Drama that Whale's had made,which led to me getting ready to pay a visit to paradise.The plot:Desperate to each get away from their troubled lives,a group of people get on board a luxury sea plane to China.On the way to China,the plane gets caught in the middle of a tropic storm,which causes it to crash in the ocean.Barely surviving the crash,the handful of survivors spot an island near the wreck,and decide to swim to the shore.Reaching the island,the survivors start to fear that they will not be found,due to the island appearing to be completely deserted.Searching round the island,the survivors are shocked to discover 2 inhibitions:one called Jim Taylor and the other one being his loyal servant Ping.Placing their hopes on him helping them to get off the island,Taylor reveals that he has other plans,as he uncovers each of the survivors hidden pasts.View on the film:Filmed when the change in studio head had led to him losing his main supporters,directing auteur James Whale is only about to show the edge of his past, eye-catching, stylised canvas.Whale & cinematographer George Robinson (who had worked with Whale on the interesting The Road Back) cleverly use a minimal amount of flames to create a scorching hot atmosphere on the island.Despite working on a low budget,Whale's is impressively still able to continue on some of the main themes featured in his work,thanks to the survivors trying to keep their shady upper-class backgrounds hidden,by each giving themselves a "humble" appearance on the island,which the lower-class Taylor is able to reveal as a facade.Taking a scatter-shot approach in their focus of the island residences ,the screenplay by Harold Buckley/Louis Stevens/ Lester Cole & Robert Lee Johnson is disappointingly unable to give each of the characters "their moment" to shine,which whilst allowing Jim Taylor to stand out as a boo-hiss baddie,leads to most of the survivors not being given any distinctive features.Along with a fun cameo from Dwight Frye, John Boles gives a marvellous performance in his reunion with Whale,as Boles curls Taylor's lips on every order that he barks to his fellow islanders,as the crash survivors discover that this is an island far from paradise.

This film Sinners In Paradise was an interesting find. It's a combination of The Lost Horrizon, Stagecoach, The Admirable Crichton with a bit of Gilligan's Island thrown in. An interesting mix of people are passengers on a sea plane bound for China which crashes in the Pacific and the surviving passengers plus a steward from the crew are tossed into the sea. They make it to a tropical island where John Boles and his servant Willie Fung have set up house. He's not a very hospitable host and forces these people to work for their keep. Some of them like Senator Gene Lockhart and heiress Charlotte Wynters are not used to manual labor. In this new society that is forming on the island they're at the bottom of the pecking order and resent it.The rest of the survivors include steward Don Barry from the crew, recent divorcée Madge Evans bound for China to serve as a missionary, mob hit man Bruce Cabot, working class girl brassy Marion Martin, widow Nana Bryant looking to join her son in Shanghai, and a pair of munitions manufacturers Milburn Stone and Morgan Conway looking to make some money off the various wars going in China. It's quite an interesting group of castaways here on Boles' Island.The iconoclastic Boles is a man of mystery. Their host has good and sufficient reason for not wanting to return to civilization. In point of fact those who want to get back the most are the ones that civilization could do without.Lockhart is the most interesting character of the bunch. He can't figure out why a natural born 'leader' and man of the people isn't just handed responsibility to lead the castaways. He's not a great advertisement for our political leadership.James Whale directed this film and it was a reunion of sorts with Boles who was in the cast of his most acclaimed work, the original Frankenstein. Although by now Whale was directing B films and Sinners In Paradise is definitely in that category, it's still an interesting piece of work and worthy of more than one look.

I really want to like 'Sinners In Paradise' more than I actually did, just because the premise is so big, so juicy, it could be so much more than it is, and because what James Whale actually left us with feels like just a teaser of what he could have done. The film could easily have been twice as long as it is, and even to those who viewed it in 1938, it probably came off as very entertaining and thrilling at times, but some were probably left feeling disappointed, as the idea is really half-baked.Part 'Lord Of The Flies', part 'Gilligan's Island', I was wishing that 'Sinners In Paradise' would be just more... sinister the entire time. I kept hoping for these people to die off Agatha Christie murder mystery style, and I waited and waited for it to happen. But it never did. Alas, there are quite a few enjoyable characters here, but certain characters are just pure filler, and its a shame that their characters weren't more well developed, because there is certainly the time for it. Madge Evans and John Boles are basically pretty forgettable as our leads, and they are overshadowed by more likable characters like Gene Lockhart and Willie Fung.All in all, 'Sinners In Paradise' comes off as an enjoyable, watchable film, from the man who brought us 'Frankenstein' in 1931, but it feels like Whale was just looking more to have fun with making this film, rather than having it be a serious endeavor. I hope this film makes it to the screen again one day, perhaps as a remake, but more in the vein of films like 'Identity' instead of 'Six Days, Seven Nights'.SINNERS IN PARADISE -----7/10.