Prison Ship (Columbia, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards TCM showed an equally interesting movie, Prison Ship, obviously made by Columbia Pictures in the waning days of World War II but prefaced with a prologue announcing that Japan had surrendered and the war was over, but this movie would tell a hitherto untold story of Japanese war atrocities. The central premise – and it’s apparently historically accurate – was that those dastardly Japanese would load prisoners of war onto ancient naval vessels they were about to scrap anyway, allow them to sail without any blackout protections or covers on the portholes, then have them at sea as sitting ducks for American submarine attacks. So the Japanese would have that many fewer prisoners’ mouths to feed and they could effectively slaughter their prisoners without being accused of war crimes. The latest cargo of prisoners is being loaded onto a derelict ship and consists of war correspondent Anne Graham (Nina Foch), who’s carrying negatives of photos she’s taken of the Japanese committing war crimes; Tom Jeffries (Robert Lowery, warming up his superhero chops for his portrayal of Batman in the second Columbia serial about the Caped Crusader, Batman and Robin, in 1948); Pierre “Frenchie” LeBron (Louis Mercier), who formerly performed a Houdini-style escape act that showed off his skills as a lock-picker; nightclub entertainer Winnie De Voe (Barbara Pepper, considerably heftier than she was in her mid-1930’s bad-girl roles in Our Daily Bread and A Day at the Races but still charming and salty in a sympathetic role); a British vaudevillian who worked the Japanese homeland long enough to learn their language; and the other assorted flotsam and jetsam typical of movies like this.

The plot is nothing special except for the ingenuity of writers Josef Mischel and Ben Markson in figuring out ways the assorted prisoners can fight back and successfully survive despite the dastardly Japanese plot to knock them off, but what makes this an interesting movie is the skill of the writers, director Arthur Dreifuss and cinematographer Philip Tannura in creating and sustaining tension and suspense within the confines of a ship. Though Prison Ship is one of those agitprop movies in which the good guys are very, very good, the bad guys are very, very bad and there aren’t any internally conflicted characters (like Humphrey Bogart’s role in Casablanca) who redeem themselves by sacrificing in the name of a Greater Cause, visually it looks almost like a film noir, with plenty of oblique camera angles and chiaroscuro visuals. Nothing I’d seen of Dreifuss’s work suggested he had a movie this good in him; he was born in Frankfurt and actually began his career as a choreographer. Unlike Richard Oswald, who’d had a major career in German films before he had to flee the Nazis, Dreifuss emigrated to the U.S. in 1928 and made his way to Hollywood in the early sound era as a dance director. He graduated to full-fledged director of musical shorts in 1937 and made his first directorial feature, a “race” movie called Double Deal, in 1939. Thereafter he made the rounds of “B” studios like Monogram and PRC as well as briefly working at Columbia; Dreifuss’s mentor, Sam Katzman, ultimately hired him for some of his cheapie rock ‘n’ roll musicals in the 1950’s (including the unusually interesting Juke Box Rhythm, an engaging attempt to graft the plot of Roman Holiday onto a teen musical), and his career ultimately went to the graveyard of so many “B” directors, television.

Here Dreifuss is at his creative peak, ably sustaining suspense with a story that seems contrived and predictable but is surprisingly entertaining given what Dreifuss does with it. It’s also got a lot of Chekhov’s pistols in it, including the revelation that Anne Graham speaks Japanese (and can therefore warn her fellow prisoners of the awful fates the Japanese bad guys have in store for them) and has radio experience (so she can commandeer the ship’s radio room and try to warn off the American submarine that’s about to torpedo them; she gets as far as “SOS PRI” before the Japanese cut the radio’s transmitter line but that’s enough), while “Frenchie” LeBron is able to use his lock-picking skills to make a duplicate key so the prisoners (at least the ones we’re focused on) can let themselves out any time. The movie also has a marvelous performance by Chinese-American actor Richard Loo, once again playing a Japanese villain (as Edward G. Robinson rather cynically pointed out in his autobiography, all the Japanese villains in World War II-era movies were played by Chinese actors because America had interned its Japanese residents in relocation camps Robinson called “the American equivalent of Dachau”) and playing him to the nines even though one wonders why the Japanese are willing to sacrifice an officer this important and intelligent on what amounts to a suicide mission. Ultimately the sub sinks the prison ship but first rescues the inmates aboard, and Tom Jeffries and Anne Graham are romantically paired at the fade-out. Prison Ship is an oddball movie but a very good one given its limitations, and the people who made it could hardly have anticipated the way America’s “line” would change after World War II, in which Japan was able to avoid the war-crimes trials the Allies put Germany through and enter a long-term alliance with the U.S. after Mao’s Communists definitively won the Chinese civil war in 1949 and the U.S. decided we needed a strong anti-Communist Japan as a bulwark against China! And of course, like the 1943 Batman serial, it's ironic to see at the end of this hellaciously anti-Japanese movie the name of the Japanese company that now owns it, Sony.