A brisk and richly imagined early talkie largely forgotten even in Ronald Colman's hardly voluminous filmography, Wesley Ruggles' Condemned (1929) is not the stilted, trying affair you'd imagine, given the release date (less than two years after the debut of rudimentary synch sound technology) and its attendant mechanical handicaps. If you've seen Singin' in the Rain (1952) or The Artist (2011), or any number of actual early talkies from the 1928-30 transitional period, you know what kind of strictures filmmakers faced, and what kind of tiresome, unimaginative theatrical gruel often resulted. In fact, of the many hundreds of films made in that era, only a fraction survive, precisely because once the '30s arrived properly and sound technology was streamlined, the industry had already decided that no one in their right mind would ever want to look at those early films, with their stiff compositions and canned dialogue, ever again.

Ruggles' film is one of the exceptions - still in 1929, you see him mobilize his camera by shooting sound-free and then editing in ambient noise and talk. You also see elaborate tracking shots that absolutely have synched dialogue - if Ruggles could pull this off this early, why couldn't everyone? Maybe it's because Condemned had something of a sizable-for-1929 budget, thanks to producer Samuel Goldwyn. The film is fairly filthy with large-scaled sets (including the first sequence, with a huge multi-tiered interior of a prison ship, filled with howling convicts in stacked cages), bustling costumed crowds, and enough faked tropical melodrama to make Josef von Sternberg cock an envious eyebrow. The story is classic in its simple romanticism: on Devil's Island, in French Guiana, a rogue-ish thief (Colman) is chosen, thanks to his undeniable manners and affable personality, to butler for the warden (a preposterously mustached Dudley Digges) and his wife (Ann Harding). Naturally a prisoners' love story germinates, even as Colman, like all the convicts, is always scheming to escape. The key here is how the characters are conceived, in a script by future-director Sidney Howard (from a book by someone named Blair Niles) - while Colman's Michel is a charming and harmless reprobate, clearly hurting only himself with compulsive thievery, Digges' brutish authoritarian is less villainous dictator than a dim functionary frustrated by how much he apparently repels his young wife. Harding, always a limited actress, is the focal point, disgusted by her husband, predictably swayed by Colman's riffraff, and as completely trapped on the island as any convict. It's one of Hollywood's weirdest bad marriages, and Ruggles lingers on their awkward moments together, as if wondering how they ever managed to find common ground at all.

Everyone's a prisoner. Ruggles, brother to Charles Ruggles and directing since the teens, understands the scenario's pressure points, from all perspectives - Digges is always trying to corner Harding in a sexual way (this is Pre-Code), a maddening domestic situation that explodes when he becomes quite rightly suspicious, and jealous, of Colman. A lot of the story's tensions are manifested visually, as when in a two-shot Digges tries to get his wife to drink, presumably to loosen her up and make her pliable, but she demurs and leaves, taking the lamp with her - leaving him brooding in complete shadow, an image that Ruggles holds on to.

It's also a surprisingly empathic film, finding plenty of little moments of brotherhood between convicts, and getting tremendous mileage from watching Colman watch the other actors, looking for opportunities to escape but also helplessly feeling for their plights. (Not enough credit has been given to Colman as one of the Golden Age's best under-actors, a point made by the unconvincing oddness of the Oscar he got years later, as a showy actor-madman, in A Double Life, 1947.) Of course, the film climaxes with a plot in which Colman and Harding escape together, but since it was an era in which bittersweet tragedy held more sway in story structure than improbable happy endings, the tumble of events, accidents and crises, as Digges' furious husband pursues his quarry through the nighttime swamps of French Guiana (all nicely simulated in the studio), does not resolve neatly. (Still, Colman's breakaway, hiding in a barrel and rolling right through guards and into the water, is almost Keaton-esque.)

Ruggles musters one of the film's best single images here, watching the two boats carrying the two lovers from above, water between them, as they go in opposite directions, eventually leaving nothing but a stretch of dark water filling the frame. Unusual for its year, and from a director no one has ever sung the praises of very highly, Condemned is as visually and texturally rich as movies made long after the struggle with sound technology was over.

By Michael Atkinson