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The Ghost Ship
Least of the Lewtons
1943
Review: March 25, 2008
Director: Mark Robson
Starring: Richard Dix, Russell Wade, Edith Barrett, Ben Bard
I wouldn’t bother.
THE SETUP:
Guy ships out with the requisite psycho Captain.
DISCUSSION:
This is a part of my Val Lewton boxed set, which contains some of my favorite movies of all time. So when I had nothing from Netflix and wasn’t excited about anything else, I thought I’d dose myself with some of that old Lewton greatness. Unfortunately, greatness is in rather sparse supply in this entry.
We open with the silhouette of a ship playing in and out within this mist as the credits roll. So far, so good. Then this guy, Merriam, boards a ship. He is to be third mate. He asks this guy where he can find the captain, and the guy gestures menacingly with his knife. Ominous! Then we have a sudden voice-over from the guy with the knife, who is a mute. He says “Here is another person I can never know… but I can know things that they can never know.”
So he meets the captain, who is named STONE [I hope you don’t pick up any significance from that]. Stone says that he chose Merriam because he thinks Merriam is like he was back in the day. On his way out, Merriam makes to kill a moth, but the captain stops him and says he has no right to kill the moth, as the moth isn’t dependent on him for its safety. Tuck that one behind your ear for later retrieval.
So they discover a dead man before they even leave port, one of the sailors. Then they have painted this huge steel hook. Merriam wants to secure it, but the captain specifically orders him not to, as he doesn’t want to mark up the wet paint. Later the hook starts to swing wildly, threatening to brain the guys and destroy anything nearby, and everyone blames Merriam, who passed on the captain’s orders. The captain is unapologetic, to say the least. When told that he could have killed one of his men, he says he has rights over their lives, because they depend on him for their safety. This reasoning is not approved by the Reasonability in Reasoning Council of 1934. But, the sequence where the huge hook is swinging is fairly unusual and tense, so that makes up for something.
Meanwhile, Merriam has made friends with the radio operator, Sparks, who complains to him about the captain and his monomaniacal ways. Then a certain sailor is elected to complain to the captain about the sailors’ treatment. A few minutes later, in the movie’s best scene, that sailor is in a chamber, arranging the heavy metal links [as big as a man’s head] of the anchor chain as it is brought on ship. The captain walks by and closes and locks the door, so the man is trapped. No one on deck can hear his cries, because of the loud clank-clanking of the chain, and for a long time the soundtrack of the film is filled with nothing but the clanking of the chain, as we know that a man is being buried alive just below. It’s an excellent sequence, and probably alone constitutes the best reason to watch this movie.
Merriam immediately sees what happened and accuses the captain of murder. Of course the captain thinks he was perfectly within his rights. When they land for a few days, Merriam brings formal charges against the captain, and follows a short trial, which is decided in favor of the captain. At least Merriam won’t have to serve on the ship anymore. But then he ends up in an arranged fight—and wakes up the next day on the ship, already far out of port!
That’s where I’m going to leave things off. It continues, and resolves itself in a not-wholly-surprising way. This was the absolute weakest of all the Val Lewton movies I’ve seen, and I now only have one out of seven left in my boxed set. It doesn’t even have remarkable photography, as the majority of these films do. It’s only moderately interesting, the conflict with the captain not really that interesting, because we don’t know what the captain wants. Just to own a bunch of men, or protect his authority? The movie just never really seems to catch or get that interesting, it just starts, has some okay set-pieces, and ends.
If you don’t have the boxed set, there’s not much reason to seek this movie out on its own. If you do, you can still skip it, but you might want to drop it in one day to watch the chain sequence, which really is very good—much better than the movie that surrounds it. No Lewton film is going to be a waste of time, but this is by far the least compelling of them that I’ve seen.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you don’t have the boxed set or it doesn’t show up on cable, I would skip it. If you do have the boxed set, watch at least the chain sequence.
