by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The
Prisoner of Shark Island, another
item (like Young Mr. Lincoln) from the Ford at Fox boxed set, a voluminous package containing 24 films on DVD in a 12” x
12” x 3” box so intimidating that we haven’t watched as many of the movies in
it as we no doubt would have if it had been more normally packaged. (“It’s like
getting out the family Bible!” Charles joked.) This was on my list of
Lincoln-related movies I wanted to see again after we watched the most recent
films about him, Robert Redford’s The Conspirator and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln — including the 1930 D. W. Griffith biopic Abraham
Lincoln and Ford’s Young Mr.
Lincoln from 1939 — and was one of
the most interesting one since it deals at least in part with the same story as
The Conspirator: the arrest of eight
people for conspiring to kill Lincoln (and, though Nunnally Johnson’s script
here doesn’t make the point, to assassinate the next two people in line for the
presidency, vice-president Andrew Johnson and secretary of state William Seward:
the plotters were a group of diehard Confederates from Virginia and their aim
was to decapitate the Union government and thereby accomplish through
assassination what the South had been unable to win on the battlefield) and the
decision of the U.S. government (particularly secretary of war Edwin Stanton)
to try them by a military tribunal rather than a civilian court.
The
Prisoner of Shark Island was
released by 20th Century-Fox but was actually produced for Darryl F.
Zanuck’s Twentieth Century Pictures before it merged with Fox — and it was
pretty clear that some of the prison sets themselves were recycled from
Twentieth Century’s mega-hit version of The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat as star and Rowland V. Lee as
director two years earlier. The parallels don’t end there because both are
stories about innocent men thrown into horrible prisons for their alleged
involvements in political conspiracies — really for their bad luck in ending up
on the wrong side of a civil war. The central character of Prisoner is Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter in the best
performance of his career; the enervated quality that frequently made him
annoying is just right for this part), the Maryland country doctor who on the
night of Lincoln’s assassination was visited by two men fleeing from
Washington, D.C. to Virginia. One of the men had a broken leg and asked Dr.
Mudd to set it, which Mudd did. Unbeknownst to Mudd — at least in this version;
The Conspirator took a quite different
view of him — the man with the broken leg was John Wilkes Booth and he had
broken his leg making his dramatic leap from the box at Ford’s Theatre where he
had fatally shot Lincoln to the stage, crying out, “Sic semper tyrannis!” Mudd
admitted he’d seen Booth before on stage as an actor but said he’d never met
him off-stage and hadn’t recognized him the night Booth came to his door and he
set Booth’s leg.
Nonetheless, he’s arrested by Union officers — who arrive when
Mudd’s out delivering the 12th baby of his favorite slave, Buck
(Ernest “Bubbles” Whitman, later the announcer on the Armed Forces Radio
Service’s Jubilee broadcasts and Hattie
McDaniel’s boyfriend on the TV series Beulah), and his wife Rosabelle (played by Hattie
McDaniel’s near-lookalike sister Etta, though she doesn’t appear until a gag
scene at the end) — so the first person they meet in Mudd’s family is his
diehard Confederate sympathizer father-in-law, Col. Dyer (Claude Gillingwater).
They find the boot Mudd had cut off Booth’s foot in order to set his leg, with
his first two names crudely scratched out of the inside (John Wilkes Booth would have been vain enough to wear personalized boots!)
but clearly recognizable, when Mudd’s daughter Martha (Joyce Kay) is playing
with it as a sled for her doll. Mudd is arrested and put on trial with the
seven other alleged conspirators in a series of sequences in which Ford and
cinematographer Bert Glennon go for broke with the expressionistic effects —
Ford actually went through a fairly long period of expressionist atmospherics
which pretty much ended with the 1937 RKO biopic Mary of Scotland, starring Katharine Hepburn; with the success of Stagecoach in 1939 (his first Western since the undeserved
financial failure of his late-silent masterpiece Three Bad Men in 1926) Ford’s films eschewed dark, shadowy
atmospherics for the bright daylight of the Western genre and the broad vistas of Monument Valley.
The
prisoners are brought into the courtroom wearing hoods — historically accurate
(the idea was to protect them against being lynched) but also a great movie
effect — and Ford and Glennon give us a series of heart-rending close-ups that
vividly contrast the overall seediness of these men (we’re supposed to believe
Mudd doesn’t belong here because he’s so much nattier-looking than his
co-defendants) with the enormity of the crime they’re being tried for and
railroaded into conviction and execution. Both Prisoner and the recent Conspirator contain strikingly similar scenes condemning the
use of military courts to try civilians — if anything, Nunnally Johnson’s
script is even more radical than James D. Solomon’s for The Conspirator; Johnson has the court’s convener, assistant
secretary of war Erickson (Arthur Byron), order the nine generals sitting in
judgment against the prisoners to “be hard” and not be swayed by such civilian
nonsense as “reasonable doubt.” The trial takes place behind closed doors and
neither Mudd nor his attorney, General Ewing (Douglas Wood), is permitted to
offer a defense — Mudd tries to speak in his own defense, he’s shut up instantly,
and asked to make sure his client maintains respect for the court, Ewing
delivers the barbed rejoinder, “I’m sure my client has as much respect for this
court as I do.”
All eight alleged conspirators are sentenced to hang
(historically inaccurate; in real life, only four of them were) and Mudd
doesn’t find out until he’s in the courtyard facing the gallows with the rest
of them, with his wife Peggy (Gloria Stuart — whose presence here puts Warner
Baxter one degree of separation from Leonardo di Caprio!) and daughter looking
on, that his sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment on Dry Tortugas, a
Caribbean island at the end of the Florida archipelago that includes Key West.
Once there he meets up with the sadistic Sgt. Rankin (John Carradine in one of
his best performances — as Charles pointed out, he’s scarier here than he was
in most of his horror films!), who’s determined to dispatch Dr. Mudd as soon as
he can find a pretext for shooting him. He’s shunned by everyone, including
prison doctor MacIntyre (O. P. Heggie), whom Mudd was hoping that in setting
Booth’s leg he was just following the Hippocratic Oath and giving him the
medical care he deserved no matter what he’d done.
The only supporter he has on the island is Buck, who’s hired
on as a guard — most of the prisoners on Dry Tortugas (called “Shark Island”
because the prison, ironically called “Arcadia” and bearing over its gate
Dante’s famous motto about abandoning hope all who enter here, is surrounded by
a shark-filled moat) — are white and most of the guards are Black) and smuggles
him messages from home and necessary items like soap, important less for
cleanliness than as a protection against mosquito bites. Mudd makes a desperate
attempt to escape — he was hoping to get as far as Key West, turn himself in to
civilan authorities and get the normal civilian trial he should have had in the
first place — but is caught and thrown in solitary confinement. Then a
yellow-fever epidemic hits the prison and MacIntyre himself is stricken — and with
Mudd the only doctor on board, and ships that are supposed to be delivering
medicines and supplies unwilling to land on the island for fear their crews
would catch the disease, he’s finally released from solitary and put in charge
of caring for the victims, including Sgt. Rankin and, eventually, Mudd himself.
When the next ship bearing medicine refuses to land, Mudd has the Black
cannoneers fire on it until its captain agrees to land on the island and
offload the needed supplies. Eventually Mudd’s heroic fight against the
epidemic — including opening the windows to air out the hospital wards — wins
him a pardon from President Andrew Johnson and he’s able to return home to his
family in Maryland.
The Prisoner of Shark Island is one of the greatest movies ever made — even
though it’s saddled with one of the tackiest titles ever, one which makes it
seem more an action-adventure or a horror film than an historical drama. It’s
beautifully cast throughout — Ford threw a lot of his “regulars” into it,
including Harry Carey as the commandant at Dry Tortugas, but they’re less
recognizable here than they usually were — and vividly staged; Bert Glennon put
all the lessons in expressionist filmmaking he’d learned from working with
Josef von Sternberg at Ford’s disposal, and working with a story about the
claustrophobic prison environment rather than the wide-open spaces of the Old
West, Ford nonetheless shows off his chops as an action and suspense director.
The nature of the story keeps Ford’s sentimentality — like Chaplin, Ford’s
sentimental streak was his biggest weakness as an artist — in check, and in a
wise and unusual move for 1936 he uses almost no background music. The scenes
of Warner Baxter’s escape attempt actually gain power and force from being left
unscored; without an annoying music track telling us how we’re supposed to feel, we nonetheless
emotionally identify with Mudd and sympathize with him for seeing the rash act
of an escape attempt as his only way out of an impossible situation.
The
Prisoner of Shark Island is one
of Ford’s least-known films and, to my mind, one of his best — despite the
annoying streak of racism in its treatment of the Black characters. Though Ford
wasn’t as racist as D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation, The Prisoner of Shark Island reflects the same view of Blacks: “good” Blacks
are faithful, lovable servants of their white masters and betters; “bad” Blacks
join armies, take up guns and rebel against the natural order that fitted them
only for servitude. Ford’s movies were often surprisingly progressive
economically but tone-deaf when it came to depicting people of color; in Stagecoach the villain is an absconding bankers and the moral
judgments are those of populism, but the Indians are the mindless hordes they
were usually depicted as in films of the classic era. Incidentally, though the
recent film The Conspirator tallies with Prisoner in its depiction of the military tribunal that tried the alleged
conspirators as an affront to the Constitution and to human decency, its script
found Mudd guilty as charged, claiming that he and Booth had been friends and
Mudd had seen a lot more of the actor than just sitting in the audience in his
performances. Nonetheless, there have been ongoing attempts — most recently in
1992 — on the part of Mudd’s descendants to have him fully exonerated, and
another pro-Mudd version of the story was done by the Westinghouse Desilu
Playhouse TV show in 1958 and the
actor playing Mudd was Lew Ayres, who as a conscientious objector in World War
II certainly knew something about being shunned and punished for his politics!
