Blaxploitation Education Extra: I Escaped From Devil's Island

Unfortunately, one well-known actor does not really make for a Blaxploitation film.

I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Written by Richard DeLong Adams
Directed by William Witney
1973

My journey through the world of Blaxploitation has taken me down a few odd side paths, some of which include movies that starred well-known Black actors or seemed to touch on some of the common themes of Blaxploitation films, but that I don’t think actually fit within the genre. I Escaped From Devil’s Island is one of those, and even though it features Jim Brown escaping from prison, it’s pretty far from The Slams, both in terms of its Blaxploitation cred and in its overall quality.

This is much more of a standard exploitation movie, being produced by Roger and Gene Corman, and it falls into the “men’s adventure” genre. From the title on down, it’s the type of story that would be featured in one of those old pulp magazines featuring covers with bare-chested tough guys wielding machetes in the jungle, possibly accompanied by shapely native women or searching for hidden Nazi gold. It’s a historical adventure tale, taking place in 1918 with Brown and several other actors playing guys who are being kept in an infamous prison colony in French Guiana, but because they’re tough, they figure out a way to escape and make their way through the South American jungle in hopes of building new lives for themselves.

This could still potentially have touched on some Blaxploitation themes, but other than a general sense of distaste at the inhumanity of imprisoning people and subjecting them to horrible conditions, there’s little about this story that would resonate with the Black audiences who were making the genre so successful at the time. Brown is fine as a manly action hero, but while he does bring some athleticism to a few fight scenes, he doesn’t really do a whole lot to differentiate him from other B-movie actors of any race.

Quibbles about genre aside, The movie is generally enjoyable as an exploitation film that features some violence, a little bit of nudity, and characters engaging in heroics in exotic locales. It starts strong, with Brown being hauled out of a prison cell by the French guards on Devil’s Island in order to be executed. He’s placed with his head below the blade of a guillotine, but at the last moment, the major in charge of the prison comes out and announces that the French government has commuted the sentences of all prisoners scheduled to be executed, so now they’ll just have to spend the rest of their natural lives performing hard labor. That’s something of a reprieve, but Brown has no intention of staying there for any longer than he has to, so he quickly starts making plans for an escape.

One reason this movie’s story and its star seem so generic is that there’s absolutely no indication of why Brown’s character Le Bras is being imprisoned. Is he dealing with injustice or racism? Has he been wrongfully captured and convicted? Who knows; he’s just the hero that we’re supposed to root for because he’s played by a recognizable actor. Some of the other characters are Communists who are at odds with the government, including a guy named Davert (Christopher George) who becomes a sort of frenemy to Le Bras, but really, most of these guys are just there to fill the role of prisoners who may be brutalized by the guards, forced to fight each other, get killed because they threaten to expose the escape scheme, or aren’t tough enough to survive the escape attempt along with Le Bras and Davert. There’s also an appearance by Roland “Bob” Harris, who had a memorable turn as a villainous prison guard in The Slams, but here’s just here for one scene as a fellow prisoner who says that he and Le Bras are lions, and all the other prisoners are sheep.

There is one interesting element in that the prison features a bunch of “fancy boys” who wear lipstick and eyeshadow, filling the feminine role that is lacking in this environment. Unlike most other movies in this genre (including the aforementioned The Slams), the fancy boys aren’t treated like gross deviants, and one of them even plays a crucial role in the escape plan. At one point, the raft Le Bras and his compatriots are secretly building at night is about to be discovered, but he throws off suspicion by pretending that he and his fancy boy friend are in the middle of a secret tryst. It’s surprisingly non-homophobic for a movie made at the time.

When the time for escape comes, Le Bras ends up dragging along Davert, who had objected to the scheme because he didn’t want to jeopardize his negotiations with the French government for better treatment for him and his fellow Communist prisoners. But once he’s on board, he has no choice but to go along with the plan, because he’ll most likely be killed for the escape attempt regardless. Unfortunately, their raft almost immediately falls apart, and only three out of the four escapees make it to the mainland. The other one is eaten by a shark in a gloriously hokey scene that mixes stock underwater footage with a whole bunch of red paint in the water. The world would have to wait a couple of years to get the thrilling shark action it was waiting for.

The group gets involved in various adventures as they try to escape through the jungle, including being captured by an indigenous tribe. Le Bras gets shot with a blowgun dart, but he manages to stab the shooter to death before he collapses. When he wakes up, it looks like the wife of the man he killed is about to stab him to death, but she frees him instead, apparently having decided that he’s going to be her new husband. One sex scene later, Le Bras is ready to settle down and enjoy jungle life, but when his compatriots decide to escape, and he fights off some of the tribesmen in order to help them, he ends up having to leave behind what was shaping up to be a calm, sexy life and get into more danger.

There are some additional bits of action and intrigue once the escapees make it to a city in Brazil or Venezuela or someplace, but it’s not really necessary to detail everything that happens. You can probably guess that there are some setbacks, along with manly affirmations of loyalty. While I was expecting Jim Brown’s character to die, especially after he gets shot, since that’s usually what happens to the Black guy in movies like this, he gets away at the end, which may be one of the only other potential nods the movie makes in the general direction of Blaxploitation. The popularity of the genre may have provided Brown and others the opportunity to star in movies like this and be treated like heroes in their own right rather than supporting less-cool white guys, so that’s a very slight bit of progress. Despite dabbling in this sort of thing here and there, I definitely prefer the urban action and Black-centered stories of real Blaxploitation movies, so I need to get back to that as soon as possible.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Non-Blaxploitation: Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem