Captain Salvation (Cosmopolitan Pictures, MGM, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next item on TCM’s September 15 program was a “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature that proved unexpectedly interesting: Captain Salvation, made by MGM in 1927 towards the tail end of the silent-film era. The director is John S. Robertson, best known for the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the big-budget Paramount version with John Barrymore in the title roles), though he also directed Mary Pickford in her 1922 film Tess of the Storm Country and took over the 1930 Universal French Revolution film La Marsellaise, retitled Captain of the Guard, after the original director, Paul “Doc” Fejos, had a nervous breakdown during filming. Captain Salvation was based on a novel by Frederick William Wallace, who since the story is so full of religious symbolism I wondered he was a relative of Ben-Hur author General Lew Wallace. He wasn’t; he was a Canadian journalist, novelist and photographer whose specialty was writing about sailing vessels in their final days. His best-known book today is the nonfiction Wooden Ships and Iron Men (1924); he published Captain Salvation in 1925 and the movie rights were bought by William Randolph Hearst for his company, Cosmopolitan Pictures. Captain Salvation was adapted for the screen by Jack Cunningham, though the titles were written by John Colton – whose credit makes a big deal of the fact that he’d written the scandalous plays Rain and The Shanghai Gesture. The star is Lars Hanson, a Swedish actor who came to MGM in 1925 as part of the deal that brought them Swedish director Mauritz Stiller and his protégée, Greta Garbo. Hanson was the only actor who worked with Garbo on both sides of the Atlantic, co-starring with her in her breakthrough Swedish film The Story of Gösta Berling (1924) and in U.S. films Flesh and the Devil (1927) – as the second male lead opposite John Gilbert – and The Divine Woman (1928), now alas lost except for one reel found in Russia.

He got cast in this largely because he’d just made the 1926 version of The Scarlet Letter, playing adulterous priest Arthur Dimmesdale opposite Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne, and in this one he’s a seminary student about to graduate and become the pastor of Maple Harbour, Massachusetts, just south of Boston, in 1840. His name is Anson Campbell and he’s engaged to marry Mary Phillips (Marceline Day, later Buster Keaton’s leading lady in his 1928 film The Cameraman), daughter of Nathan Phillips (Jay Hunt), the head of the local church and a self-consciously “moral” busybody. For the first half-hour there’s a lot of charming byplay between Anson, his much older comic-relief roommate Zeke Crosby (George Fawcett) and Mary, including a belt-splitting contest in which she sabotages the outcome by secretly slicing through the belt of the youngest and slenderest contestant. Then a “nor’easter,” a particularly vicious storm New England’s coasts are prone to, strikes and a ship runs aground at a point called “Bleaker’s Woe” containing Bess Morgan (Pauline Starke). Bess had been run out of Boston for being a prostitute – John Colton’s titles are surprisingly explicit about this – and to the shock of Nathan Phillips, Anson’s own father Peter (Sam De Grasse) and just about all the townspeople of Maple Harbour, Anson takes Bess in and nurses her back to health. When one of the townspeople sees Anson massaging her legs – we can tell he’s just applying liniment to them – they get the wrong idea. Mary breaks their engagement even though Bess tries to talk her out of it, saying that she’s giving up a man who truly loves her out of prejudice. Bess admits to Anson that her moral downfall started when her stepfather molested her and got her pregnant, and though even Colton’s nervy titles don’t specify whether it was a natural miscarriage or an illegal abortion, she says, “I’m glad the baby died!”

Having nothing to live for in Maple Harbour, Anson accepts an offer for himself and Bess to ship out on a ship called the Panther, ostensibly bound for Rio de Janeiro, but once they’re at sea Anson notices that the hold is full of men in chains. The ship’s captain (Ernest Torrence, playing his usual villain role and playing it to the hilt) admits that it’s really a prison ship and the prisoners are being taken to the so-called “Islands of the Blest” to work as slave laborers in the salt mines. Anson gets assigned to take care of the prisoners and give them the tags that identify them by number so the bosses in the salt mines will know who they are. As for Bess, not surprisingly the captain has his own lascivious designs on her, which she resists as long as she can. Anson is so disgusted at what’s happened to him and where he’s ended up that he literally denounces God and gives up his faith, saying it’s the devil’s world after all. Ironically, it’s Bess who brings him back to the church. With no other way of avoiding being raped by the captain, she grabs a dagger and stabs herself (frankly I was hoping she’d stab the captain instead!), and after an operatically long, drawn-out death scene she tells Anson she’s looking forward to death because at least God will forgive her and take her into heaven. Ultimately Anson takes over the ship and sails it back to Maple Harbour, renames it the Bess Morgan (evoking the predictable reaction among the townspeople, saying how dare you throw the name of that evil woman in our faces), and Mary agrees to go with him on a series of voyages to bring the Good Word of Christianity to whoever needs it in the world. A final title explains that this was the origin of the so-called “Gospel Ships.”

Captain Salvation is a beautifully made movie, and one thing I like about it is the filmmakers are clearly creating a parable but don’t make it so obvious it gets thrown in our faces. We can tell that Anson Campbell is behaving in a far more “Christian” way than the townspeople who are condemning him, reaching out to the so-called “fallen woman” the way Jesus reached out to Mary Magdalene. (There’s even a scene in which Bess is shown washing the feet of some of the prisoners, economically making the point without spelling it out for us in dialogue or titles the way Cecil B. DeMille and his writers would have.) The film also features an incredible performance by Pauline Starke, whose only claim in film history is a very minor one – she took over a role in a 1928 film called Women Love Diamonds after Garbo walked out on it (in fact, Garbo walked out on it so far that she famously told MGM’s executives, “I t’ank I go home now,” and they assumed she just meant the bungalow in which she was staying in Hollywood – until the next time they heard from her, from Sweden). Judging from her performance here, Starke was a potentially major screen actress who definitely should have had more of a career than she did; apparently she tangled with Louis B. Mayer once too often and he blacklisted her, not only firing her from MGM but discouraging other studios from hiring her as well. It’s too bad because her performance here has “star quality” written all over it! She lived until 1977 and in later years she was philosophical about her career and what had happened to it (including getting fired from the 1929 film The Great Gabbo and replaced with Betty Compson, the wife of the film’s director, James Cruze): “I enjoyed it an awful lot, and it was very easy work, very easy. I just worked because I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the money. Then I had some difficulties that I would like to forget, and now I'm through with it, and it's out of mind. It's hard for me to recall things.”