Features:
Description:
The title of Scott King's Treasure Island doesn't refer to Robert Louis Stevenson's pirate adventure but the San Francisco military base that was home to code breakers and cryptographers in World War II. The 1999 Sundance Jury Prize-winning film begins with the look and rich black and white texture of 1940s cinema, right down to the phony newsreel and mock spy serial that precedes the film proper, but soon spins off into a bizarre, shadowy psychosexual drama. King was initially inspired by the nonfiction book The Man Who Never Was, the account of an ingenious decoy planted by British intelligence to mislead the Germans about the upcoming invasion of Sicily (which was the basis of a 1956 film with Clifton Webb), but in the film he's interested less in the espionage than the hidden private lives and repressed emotions of the film's cryptographer heroes. As they construct an elaborate back story for a corpse the military plans to dump in Japanese waters with phony invasion documents, their fears, frustrations, and obsessions rise to the surface. While it's not completely successful, King's audacious approach and unsettling scenes offer a genuinely offbeat and at times surreal look at the sexually repressed 1940s. It's a frank view of human sexuality with nudity, homoerotic content, and often off-putting sexual activity. The handsome DVD by All Day Entertainment is cleverly packaged in a hardcover booklet in a slipcase. The supplements include two separate commentary tracks by King (one on the making of and one on the meaning of the film), short documentary featurettes on the making of the film and its Sundance premiere, a complete set of storyboards (with immediate access to the scene), and deleted and extended scenes with introductions by the director. --Sean Axmaker
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