KnotMissPriceless Why so much hype?

Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch

Bluebell Alcock Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

GManfred "Safe In Hell" is a very strange picture, a whimsical story fashioned out of whole cloth by a long-forgotten playwright with a fertile imagination. A round-heeled tart kills a john and flees with her boyfriend to a Caribbean island with no extradition law. There she rents a room at a hotel populated by several gargoyle-type fugitives who are horny as toads. Everyone is in heat in the heat, especially the local constable. The story gets stranger and stranger leading up to a completely unexpected Hollywood ending.The cast is good. Dorothy Mackaill is the 'tomato' in question and she is excellent. Donald Cook is OK as her boyfriend and Ralf Harolde is appropriately sleazy as an old flame. The plot is actually kind of flimsy but Director Wellman brings it off well, aided by some fine acting performances. Black actress Nina Mae McKinney has a plum role for a black actress in an era when there were precious few to be had.This is a Pre-Code curiosity which is somewhat tame by today's standards but still worth a watch, since it is a one-of-a-kind sort of tabloid story, surreal and sensational. It was on TCM the other morning and is not available, so wait for it to come on again.

mgconlan-1 "Safe in Hell" proved to be a stunning movie in many respects, a major precursor of film noir both thematically and stylistically. Wellman and cinematographer Sid Hickox stage many of the scenes in chiaroscuro darkness, and even the opening title — in which the words "SAFE IN HELL" appear as cutouts in a black field with fire billowing forth from behind the letters — is visually stunning and sets the mood for the film instead of merely announcing what it's called. (The title and the director's name — in small print on the same card — are the only credits we see at the outset; the other credits are relegated to the end, in the fashion that's now become standard but was highly unusual in 1931.) The script requires the actors, Mackaill and Cook in particular, to make some pretty abrupt hairpin turns in emotions and motivations, but it's a testament to their skill (especially Mackaill's — Cook's is a pretty straightforward good-guy lead and his only spectacular sequence is the early one in which his loathing suddenly turns into desperate protectiveness and love when she's about to be arrested) that all the emotional turns are quite credible and she's equally believable as a bad girl and a good one. Like Charles Vidor's "Sensation Hunters", made for Monogram two years later and the closest film I could think of to the mood of this one, "Safe in Hell" manages to convey the oppressiveness of the environment and the desperation with which the heroine is faced in trying to maintain (what's left of) her virtue in the face of the economic and sexual pressures on her.It also features two remarkable characters, the Black proprietess of the hotel on Tortuga where most of the action takes place (Nina Mae McKinney, the femme fatale of "Hallelujah!" here cast as a positive character) and her assistant, Newcastle (Clarence Muse). The screenwriters wrote the lines for McKinney and Muse in phony dialect but they actually delivered them in normal English. (Score one for William Wellman for allowing them to get away with that!) McKinney also gets to warble the song "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," ostensibly to a recording — no doubt the song got in the film because her Black co-star Muse co-wrote it with Leon and Otis René! Originally released with an advisory that the film was "Not for Children" (anticipating the Hollywood rating system that would ultimately displace the Production Code), "Safe in Hell" is a great movie, a forgotten gem that deserves to be better known than it is and an example of the Hollywood studio system working on all cylinders and producing something that acknowledged the clichés and yet also defied them quite movingly. Why Warner Home Video didn't include this on the boxed set of Wellman's pre-Code films for Warners — when it's a better movie than any of the ones they DID include — is beyond me.

writers_reign This is an early talkie from William Wellman who went on to make some excellent movies like Battleground. It's an out-an-out and unashamed meller with not a lot of originality in the one about the hooker who lucks into a good man who's prepared to help her escape justice after she murders a 'trick'. Being a seaman he is obliged to leave her on an island in which she is the only white woman which makes her the lust object for the other white men, outlaws to a man, already holed up there. One of them, the gaoler-cum-executioner, is especially taken with her and steals the mail the seaman is writing to her, letting her think she is abandoned. The guy she 'murdered' in New Orleans turns up on the island leaving her free to return to New Orleans which doesn't sit well with the executioner, who 'lends' her a gun (which is against the law of the island), knowing she is almost sure to shoot the guy she already shot again. I could go on but I'm sure if I did you'd be ahead of me. For the time (1931) this was fair entertainment even with no durable actors.

mukava991 Although this film directed by the versatile William Wellman is not essentially different from many other fallen women pictures of the early talkie era, it has elements that lift it out of the ordinary. For contemporary viewers it's an opportunity to see Dorothy Mackaill in a starring role. She was a beautiful and self-possessed actress whose career came and went too quickly. At times she looks so much like Marion Davies that you could easily mistake them for twins. Here she plays a prostitute fleeing the law with a young fellow who loves her. He deposits her in a hotel on a steamy Caribbean island inhabited by escaped male criminals. There is the appealing shock of seeing two African-American actors actually speaking and behaving in a dignified and even admirable manner: Nina Mae MacKinney and Clarence Muse as a hotel proprietress and porter, respectively. Muse speaks the King's English better than the blonde leading lady and comports himself in a far more civilized manner than any of the white men. MacKinney is spectacular. She holds her own no matter who she is playing against and even sings a spirited round of "Sleepy Time Down South" as she pours wine for a large table of diners. Another case of wasted talent in the old Hollywood days.