Partially filmed on location in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Outcast of the Islands is a reasonably faithful adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel. Trevor Howard plays a degenerate British expatriate who wanders aimlessly around a Malayan island. Most of the film involves the search for Howard by those on whom he's turned his back. None of the characters is particularly likable; even Howard loses audience sympathy for his plight by betraying one of his closest friends (Ralph Richardson), a ship's captain who'd raised Howard from boyhood. The unrelenting pessimism of Outcast of the Islands was such that the American distributors felt the need to ease the characters' pain by editing the picture down from 102 minutes to 94.