The Ghost Ship (RKO, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Seventh Victim Charles and I watched The Ghost Ship, the very next movie in Val Lewton’s canon, and a bit of a disappointment even though it’s a capable “B” movie that was surprisingly well produced. As one of the interviewees in the documentary Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy noted, making a movie was easier at a major studio than at one of the cheapie Poverty Row companies like Republic, Monogram or PRC because they had inventories of standing sets built for larger, more expensive movies – like the great all of Amberson Manor, built by Orson Welles and art director Mark-Lee Kirk for The Magnificent Ambersons, including three stained-glass panels representing Faith, Hope and Charity which Kirk carefully reproduced from Booth Tarkington’s detailed description in the novel. They worked well for the opening scene of The Seventh Victim, which after all is set in a convent. The Ghost Ship is full of sets and models built for previous RKO productions; the sets representing the ship itself were reused from Orson Welles’ Journey Into Fear and an earlier RKO film, Pacific Liner; the model of the ship’s exterior is the same one used in King Kong; and the sets representing the Mexican town of San Sebastian (not the same locale as the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian that was the setting of I Walked With a Zombie) are also obviously recycled from other, bigger-budgeted films. The Ghost Ship – a title also used by the mysterious novelist B. Traven, author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, though the two stories have nothing to do with each other – is pretty much your standard generic tale about a ship’s crew at sea on a vessel commanded by a captain whom they gradually realize is a psycho.

It was actually withdrawn from circulation for decades because RKO lost a plagiarism suit filed by Samuel R. Golding and Norbert Faulkner, who claimed the film was based on a play they had written and submitted to Lewton’s unit. RKO’s legal department worked out a settlement of the claim – Golding and Faulkner were well known in Hollywood as nuisance claimants, what today would be called copyright trolls, and the studio’s lawyers figured it would be better to pay them off with a small sum than take the case to court. But Lewton insisted on taking the case to trial – and the studio actually lost, though it occurred to me that had RKO’s lawyers been more on the ball, they could have cited plenty of similar stories of ships at sea with crazy captains, including Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, that were safely in the public domain in 1943. I also suspect Lewton may have blamed the plagiarism debacle on the film’s officially credited writers, Leo Mittler (story) and Donald Henderson Clarke (screenplay), since he never used either of them again and for his next films went back to writers he trusted: DeWitt Bodeen, Ardel Wray and “Carlos Keith” (a.k.a. Val Lewton himself). The Ghost Ship also had similarities to Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf and the movie Warner Bros. made from it in 1941 with Edward G. Robinson as crazy captain Wolf Larsen (though when I showed that to Charles he questioned the casting of short, stout, Jewish Robinson as a character who fancied himself as an Aryan superman, and that made me want to see the earlier sound version with Milton Sills, who starred in the 1923 film of Captain Blood and held his own in the looks and sexiness departments with Errol Flynn).

The fact that RKO lost a plagiarism suit over The Ghost Ship may account for Mark Robson’s defensiveness, when he was interviewed by Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse, when he said The Ghost Ship ‘“was not based on Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, nor was it similar.” Though my only knowledge of The Sea Wolf is the 1941 film, directed by Michael Curtiz and written by Robert Rossen (who got a typical upbraiding from Jack Warner, who asked Rossen why it took him two months to write a script based on The Sea Wolf when it had only taken London three weeks to write the novel), the two movies have distinct similarities.notably in the subsidiary characters of the young men who befriend the captain (stowaway George Leach in The Sea Wolf, third mate Tom Merriam in The Ghost Ship) and has long talks with him before deciding he’s crazy. The Ghost Ship has one truly great terror scene – a runaway grappling hook on the deck, which Captain Will Stone (Richard Dix) has ordered the crew not to fasten for fear it will leave a line on the fresh coat of paint he’d ordered put on it. The hook flies out of control during a storm and, among other things, takes out a lifeboat as well as endangering the crew members in its path, and the crew have to wrestle it down like a rampaging lion or alligator to bring it under control. There are also long scenes in which Captain Stone explains his concept of “authority,” and like the villains in a lot of American movies made during World War II he starts talking like a fascist leader as he prattles on and on about how it’s the destiny of most men to be ruled and a few men at the top to rule them.

As I wrote the last time I watched this movie ini July 2013 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-ghost-ship-rko-1943.html), the main problem with The Ghost Ship is the low-voltage cast; Ricard Dix is actually superb as the captain, limning his progress from eccentricity to florid, homicidal insanity perfectly in a role that harkened back to the great parts he’d played for RKO in the early 1930’s, Cimarron (1931), an epic Western that was RKO’s only Academy Award winner for Best Picture (though 15 years later RKO got a second Best Picture by proxy as distributors of Sam Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives), an the follow-up, The Conquerors (1932). There’s a marvelous scene in which Merriam (Russell Wade) is accusing Stone of “ranting and raving,” when in fact he is the one raising his voice and Stone is speaking in a calm, rational tone. I also strongly suspect The Ghost Ship influenced Herman Wouk when he wrote The Caine Mutiny (1951, filmed 1954), since there are strong parallels between the two: both feature young officers who are initially impressed with their captains and only realize over time that they’re crazy, and both stories feature scenes in which the young officer attempts to report the captain to authorities on shore, only in The Caine Mutiny he doesn’t have the guts to go through with it and in The Ghost Ship Merriam is confronted by an official of the steamship line Stone’s shio, the Altair, is part of, and whether out of genuine loyalty or fear the other sailors, both officers and seamen, stand by the captain when Merriam’s actions bring a disciplinary hearing against Stone.

There are also the typically atmospheric Lewton background characters, including a blind street singer (it almost wouldn’t be a Val Lewton movie without a street singer!) at the beginning and a mute sailor on board Stone’s ship, the Altair, who becomes a deus ex machina and kills Stone at the end. But as good as Richard Dix is, and as full of fascinating supporting actors is the rest of the cast (notably Dewey Robinson as the straw boss “Boats” – he looks and sounds so much like the young Broderick Crawford that when I first saw the film I thought it was he – and Edmund Glover as “Sparks” Winslow, the ship’s radioman – though in a 1940’s movie about a ship it was inevitable that the radio operators would have the nickname “Sparks”! – along with Sir Lancelot in his second of three films for Lewton, there to add color and atmosphere as well as sing several sea shanties and a song about his home in Trinidad, which Lewton and Robson use ironically to underscore a potentially deadly confrontation between Stone and Merriam), Russell Wade is barely competent as Merriam and a character Lewton, Robson, Mittler and Clarke intended as weak becomes almost pathetic by comparison (especially since he's coming up against John Garfield,who played a similar characxter in The Sea Wolf), and we don’t have the compensation we do with Kim Hunter in The Seventh Victim because he, unlike she, did not go on to a major star career.