Devil's Island

A French army surgeon (Richard Tucker) is sent to Devil's Island for life; after seven years his fiancée (Pauline Frederick) joins him in Cayenne, where a convict's wife and children are convicts too. Their son becomes a surgeon famous enough to be pardoned. Frank O'Connor directed for Chadwick, 1926, from Leah Baird; Marian Nixon is the girl born on the island. Prints at the Library of Congress, UCLA, and the Swedish Film Institute. Independent melodrama with a colonial penal system as its engine: the law that brands the family, the commandant, the escape that becomes a pardon. Frederick ages from fiancée to gray mother. The island is the sentence that outlives the man.