Devil's Playground

Devil's Playground (Columbia) lacks novelty of background, U. S. naval deep-sea work having been used before. Jack Dorgan (Richard Dix) is a diver who can stand more subaqueous pressure than anyone else at the San Diego base but blows up handsomely when he finds Bob Mason (Chester Morris) in over-close proximity to Mrs. Dorgan (Dolores Del Rio). After Mrs. Dorgan has told the truth about this situation, Jack goes out to rescue Bob who is wrecked in the submarine Nautilus at a depth of 300 ft. Barring some crude miniature shots, the sequences dealing with the wreck and the rescue are so interesting technically that they compensate to a large extent for the bromidic situations and embarrassingly obvious dialog which lay the ground for them. Noteworthy is the photographic exposition of the inventions for the safety of undersea craft--the operation of a specially marked buoy which, released from the deck and carrying a line, enables a wrecked submarine to denote to rescue craft her position on the sea floor; the Momsen artificial lungs (TIME, Aug. n, 1930) with which some of the Nautilus' crew pass to the surface through the emergency release hatch; the salvage air intake to which a diver, reaching a disabled craft, can attach an oxygen line, feeding air to the imprisoned crew until they can be rescued in the rescue bell--a sort of undersea elevator operated on cables from the salvage ship above. If Devil's Playground had been made several years ago, when its cast names were at the top of their box-office value and its story had seldom been used, it might have been an all-time box-office record breaker.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.