I've wanted to see Safe in Hell for a long time, thinking it was some kind of archetypal pre-Code experience, and it's tawdry enough but fatally slow. Dorothy Mackaill plays a woman who was left behind by her sailor boyfriend, turned to prostitution, and ends up killing a john she apparently had a bad experience with before the movie started. That's the first ten minutes or so, and it's pretty good. Then the sailor boyfriend, who gets over the prostitution and murder stuff pretty quickly, helps her escape and, making the same mistake with his not very strong-willed girlfriend a second time, plops her alone on a miserable little island with a group of exiled lowlifes who sit in rattan chairs all day ogling her.
This proves, ultimately if not convincingly, irresistible, and once she falls the second time, it's a short walk from there to being executed for a crime she didn't commit, and trying hard to keep the secret of her sorry end from her sailor boyfriend, who really needs to find a nice gal he can leave alone somewhere for five minutes without her killing somebody, regardless of the circumstances.
I think the island stuff was originally a play, in the far-east-sleaze mode of Kongo, Shanghai Gesture, etc., and if so I think there must have been more action in it than made it to the screen, because there's a lot of suggestion that something's going to happen, but not much actually does. Mackaill is all right, she's certainly attractive and doesn't object to a pre-Code wardrobe, but she doesn't make as strong an impression as, say, Barbara Stanwyck, who was evidently Wellman's first choice.
The strongest impression is made by Nina Mae McKinney and Clarence Muse as the hotel proprietors, who exude a warmth and conviviality in their scenes that seems to have come from a different movie (and suggests that the Hell of the island was brought there by its white visitors, not intrinsic to the place). McKinney, the wonderful star of the very early sound Hallelujah!, even gets to sing a song, in the only on-screen appearance of her MGM contract (loaned out to Warners). It makes you a wish for a very different movie about her character, rather than Mackaill's.
