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The Narrow Corner Reviews

An engrossing film adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel featuring an outstanding cast of supporting players. Fairbanks plays a young Englishman who commits a murder in Australia and is sent out to sea by his powerful father, Kolker, in the hopes that the furor over the crime will die down. Kolker entrusts his son to craggy old skipper Hohl, who drinks heavily to numb the pain of the cancer that slowly consumes him. Fairbanks and Hohl become friends, and at one port of call they acquire Digges, an opium-smoking defrocked physician who comes along for the ride. After braving some violent South Seas storms, the trio stop at a tiny island and are invited to dinner by an eccentric British family that lives there. At dinner Fairbanks falls in love with the daughter, Ellis, despite the fact that she is engaged to Bellamy (the eternal doomed fiance of the 1930s). Seeing that his sweetheart has fallen for the seafaring stranger, Bellamy commits suicide, leaving behind enough evidence to throw suspicion of murder on Fairbanks once again. THE NARROW CORNER is a solid adventure film, which contains some surprisingly intense and effective scenes of sea storms while etching a memorable array of characterizations. The wandering misfits (Fairbanks, Hohl, and Digges) are vividly portrayed, each with his own endearing character quirks. Hohl is especially fine as the gruff, drunken, and slowly dying captain. The film was remade as ISLE OF FURY, an early Humphrey Bogart vehicle, but the original version remains the better of the two.