1999 American experimental independent film
Treasure Island is a 1999 American experimental independent film directed by Scott King. Described as a psychosexual black comedy, the story is about two war strategists on San Francisco’s Treasure Island naval base during World War II. It is inspired from an actual account of a counterintelligence ploy by two British officers. The film is shot in 16 mm and is in black and white.
Plot.
Frank and Samuel are two American cryptographers on Treasure Island during World War II who decode letters and look for hidden meanings behind the words. As a counterintelligence ploy, they plan to drop a dead body off the coast of Japan before an invasion. To make the body convincing, the men decide to write letters to and from him, so the Japanese army will think he is a real person.
As they write the letters, they begin to reveal things about their own lives and repressed desires. Frank, a bigamist, is married to two women and is pursuing a third wife. Samuel and his wife Penny are in a ménage à trois, which he participates in to cover up his homosexuality. As the pressures of the men’s lives begin to eat away at them, the dead body starts to torment Frank and Samuel's subconscious, interacting with the private stories of their lives.
Cast.
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Reception.
"The New York Times" critic Stephen Holden cited the film as one of the most original features at the 1999 New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, describing it as a "stylish black and white film" that turns "into an eerie ghost story exploring oppressive racial and sexual stereotypes in wartime America with deadpan humor".
In 2000, Holden wrote a longer review in which he wrote "Treasure Island" is an "increasingly chaotic comic riff on "The Man Who Never Was", Ewen Montagu's account (made into a 1956 film starring Clifton Webb) of a scheme concocted by British intelligence to mislead Germany about the invasion of Sicily." He concluded, "For all the ideas it tosses around -- and many of them are useful and painful correctives to our rose-colored fantasies [of WWII] -- "Treasure Island" is too crude a movie to muster much rhetorical clout. But in deconstructing a myth, it does find one ingenious parallel: its man who never was a paradigm becomes a paradigm for an era that never was. Or at least it wasn't the way we would like to remember it."
In "The A.V. Club", Scott Tobias wrote "Treasure Island" is "a truly audacious American independent with the courage to follow its doggedly idiosyncratic convictions. Made without so much as a nod to commercial considerations, it stood out among the dramatic-competition entries at Sundance in 1999, when it won a Special Jury Prize alongside such Indiewood fare as "Happy, Texas" and "Guinevere". But, tempting as it is to praise "Treasure Island" simply for being different, King's experimental pastiche of '40s technique and late-'90s transgression never quite comes together, falling victim to its own willful obscurity.
Accolades.
"Treasure Island" won a Special Jury Prize for Distinctive Vision in Filmmaking at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.
At the 1999 Independent Spirit Awards, it was nominated for the first John Cassavetes Award, under the name Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature (Under $500,000).
References.
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