The Ghost Ship (1943)


To hear tell the origin of The Ghost Ship was like most of Val Lewton's movies where he was tasked with developing it around titles or sets.  In this case it was the latter, as RKO still had a ship set left over from their 1939 romantic action film Pacific Liner.  Lewton came up with the idea of a sadistic, homicidal captain and had writers Donald Henderson Clarke and Leo Mittler flesh out the details.  As always he was handed a tight budget, but he once again managed to pull off an exciting, noirish film with the help of director Mark Robson.

Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) is the new third officer on the U.S.S. Altair, a merchant ship traveling from the U.S. to Mexico.  At first he is impressed by Captain Will Stone (Richard Dix), who puts a lot of pride on running a tight and clean ship, though he is warned to not get too wrapped up in the captain's cult of personality by radio operator Sparks (Edmund Glover).  However, a number of events begin to cause Merriam to question Dix's judgment.  When a crewman (Lawrence Tierney) who questioned Dix's decision not to go to port to take on extra men is killed after Stone closes the hatch that allows exit from the chain locker Merriam realizes that Stone is dangerous.

He reports the captain to the shipping agency but, as the agent is a friend of Stone and Merriam cannot find anyone to back him up, the charges are dismissed, as is Merriam from his position.  He intends to find passage back to the United States on his own but, after being knocked out in a fight, crewmember Billy Radd (Sir Lancelot) brings him back aboard the Altair.  At sea and trapped on a hostile ship, Merriam finds himself shunned by the crew as it becomes more and more clear that Stone will make sure that he never reaches port.

Despite the title this is not a conventional horror film, nor are there supernatural elements.  It refers to the state of mind of Captain Stone, who at one point admits that he sometimes doesn't remember what he is doing.  Despite that it still has many aspects of a classic 1940s fright feature, including the use of fog and shadows (some of it courtesy of archival footage from King Kong) as well as a maniac killing people off one by one.  It's a short runtime so the whole thing is quite lean, making sure the movie moves along at a fast pace.

Unfortunately, though it seemed poised to make the studio quite a bit of money, RKO had to withdraw it from circulation.  It was pretty much forgotten until it went into public domain.  The reason was because Lewton and RKO were sued for plagiarism and, despite evidence that the story was not taken from an unused script that Lewton said he never read, the courts decided differently.  What would have been a certain moneymaker, and may have helped get RKO's bosses off of his back, ended up being one of Lewton's major financial failures. 

It is not a failure of a movie and well worth seeing.  It's a bit more violent than one would expect for the time and features some great performances, especially from Dix, a former silent film actor that was trying to make a comeback.  Luckily RKO never destroyed the prints so the fall into public domain helped to make this one of the more recognizable and revered of Lewton's productions. 

The Ghost Ship (1943)
Time: 69 minutes
Starring: Russell Wade, Richard Dix, Edmund Glover
Director: Mark Robson

 

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