Mysterious Island (1961)

1865. With the aid of Gideon Spilitt, a war correspondent for the New York Herald, three Union soldiers - Cyrus Harding, Herbert Brown, and Neb Nugent - are able to break out of a Libby, a military Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia, the four men who are able to escape using one of the Confederate's surveillance hot air balloons, they in the process necessarily taking along a Confederate soldier, Pencroft, as he knows how to operate the balloon. Despite Pencroft's knowledge, the balloon nonetheless crash lands in where they believe is somewhere in the South Pacific on a seemingly deserted volcanic island. Still considering themselves at war, Captain Harding, as the senior officer, feels he should take charge. While Brown, a self-admitted coward, and Nugent, a black man, willingly go along with his orders as their superior, Spilitt and Pencroft are more reluctant in their agreement, working cooperatively for their own survival outweighing whatever hesitation they have working under Harding. The five are soon joined on the island by two Brits, Lady Mary Fairchild and her pretty young adult niece Elena, the only two survivors of a shipwreck. While there is a bounty of food and water on the island to survive, they still work toward the goal of trying to get off the island back to civilization. While they learn quickly in their stay that they share the island with a number of supersized menacing animals which provide much wanted animal protein, that is if the animals don't kill them first, they face a looming more dangerous menace preventing them from staying on the island much longer, something well known to the hidden eighth on the island.