UNEXPLORED WATERS: THE GHOST SHIP
By Paul Fileri
For me, there seem to be few times when wonderful coincidences of fortuitous circumstances lead to those personal cinematic "discoveries"-those masterful films from the past, which maybe I'd never heard of before but which I'd definitely never actively, determinedly sought out or been prepared to see with high expectations. They aren't films one can find strongly established in any canon, whether more mainstream or more eclectic, more ardently cinephiliac, and more inclusive, and they certainly aren't among the most celebrated or well-known works of their respective filmmakers' oeuvres. But they leap out at you in their own startling, thrilling ways and inevitably make you wonder how and why they have remained hidden, ignored. Movies such as Jacques Tourneur's magnificent Stars in My Crown (1950) and William Wellman's stunning Yellow Sky (1948) come to my mind, but in this space it's Mark Robson's The Ghost Ship (1943) that I feel compelled to discuss.
Ask some knowledgeable film lover about the cinema of Val Lewton, and Jacques Tourneur's bewitching trio of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man plus the Robson-directed The Seventh Victim will undoubtedly enter into the fold. Possibly even The Body Snatcher or The Isle of the Dead (directed by Robson as well), both still circulating and reasonably well available. But Robson's 1943 psychological-horror thriller The Ghost Ship has stimulated little critical writing, in large part due to a plagiarism suit brought against Lewton, Leo Mittler (the author of the movie's source story), and Donald Henderson Clarke (Lewton's screenwriter and frequent collaborator) soon after its release. RKO's and Lewton's defeat in the lawsuit led to the film's withdrawal from distribution, and ever since then screenings and television broadcasts of it have been quite rare. In fact, the only format available to me was a 16mm print of less-than-ideal quality. These conditions have rendered the film an effective hole in the run of terse but masterfully evocative B-grade pulp that made Lewton's name, and I feel confident arguing that its virtual absence is a loss for today's film culture.
While The Ghost Ship doesn't reach Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie's sustained heights of incantatory allure and uncertain horror (little in cinema does), it is a masterpiece of eerie power, narrative concision, and uncommon imagistic brilliance. With a story that's apparently direct but upon second look highly suggestive, the movie draws its force from the atmosphere and mood hanging in a shipping vessel's confined spaces, its ominous zones set alone out at sea. Thomas Merriam (Russell Wade) joins the S.S. Altair as a young Third Officer, the chosen recruit of the ship's Captain Stone (Richard Dix in an impressive performance). The Altair embarks on a voyage of unknown purpose, and before long the dead bodies of various crew members begin to turn up. In time, Merriam becomes aware that the Captain is something of a deranged tyrant and murderer, wielding his position's power with nightmarish results and unconcerned for the welfare of anyone else. Having discovered his commander's perverse realpolitik and insinuating authoritarian complex, Merriam then must fend for his life while trying to convince an apathetic crew of what's at stake.
Lewton and Robson (with cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca) ground the major elements of the film's visual style in the expressionistic nocturnal effects of its nautical setting. Shadows bob on walls due to the ship's sway, and these silhouettes are used like moving counterbalances to imposing figures placed on the opposite side of the frame. This technique forms compositions of precarious stability. The journey's first tremors of danger are illuminated in shadowy corners, a spotlight cutting through darkness to uncover the movie's first corpse, which lies in complete obscurity to all the shipmates on deck. Soon after, there's one of the film's most haunting visuals: amid fog and mist, moonlight glints off a suspended iron anchor that's been left to sweep from one side of the ship to the other like an enormous, deathly pendulum. Captain Stone looks on in stillness, while swinging lines are cleared in the masses of deckhands trying to secure the giant hook. Here the sequence achieves its power from only using one directional light source (the same spotlight that spotted the corpse) and primarily only a single, distanced shot that lets the anchor swoop down from off-screen. More so, the event taps into an experience that's mysterious and dreamlike in its terror and unfamiliarity but that's also resolutely physical and real-the focal point being an object of coldness and heaviness, impersonal and adamantine, and intruding on what once seemed so silent and spectral about the ship's environment.
In similar fashion, there is the terror of the second death. Captain Stone seals Louie, one of his sailors, inside the anchor chain's storage compartment. Oblivious to Louie's imprisonment, his crew members above deck feed the huge chain back into the compartment and crush Louie in the process. Again, what generates fear is simple and pared-down: a man captive in a chamber, death an unstoppable force. And like dropping out the sound to only gusty winds and an anchor's creaky swings in the first scene, the soundtrack is taken over by the chain links' hard metallic clanks. As in the rest of Lewton's cycle, close-ups of small, specific actions are integral to the film's aesthetic of economical editing and horror through suggestion. (It's worth noting that Robson was editor for Tourneur's three Lewton productions.) The Ghost Ship's climax occurs in Merriam's cabin, and tension builds as the movie becomes a series of focused close-ups: there's the ominous porthole over the cabin's bed, the slight opening of the cabin door, the gentle tug on the string that's rigging the doorknob to the lamp as a makeshift signal.
Additionally, Clarke and Lewton, in a way that's characteristic of their work, dot the film with self-consciously literary character traits and literary language. Merriam's best friend is Sparks, a radioman who quotes liberally from Shakespeare and offers to teach Latin. And in contrast to Dix's perfectly delivered lines, such as "You haven't the right to kill that moth. Its safety doesn't depend on you," one character's voiceover brims with figurative abstractions such as, "I see the white steel thirsting for blood and the blood running to meet it. I am a Finn and my soul is in my hand here, white and cold and knowing all things."
In narrative terms, The Ghost Ship plainly locates itself within the realm of classical horror. The voyage of a doomed ship on mist-cloaked seas (a recurrent shot is, in fact, of this very image) had been used many times before, acquiring an archetypal status of a sort of fundamental story or myth. The central threat developed in this conceit can be either internal to the story's vessel (as it is in The Ghost Ship) or external (e.g., a ship swallowed up in a Bermuda Triangle of mystery). In a film that jettisons most back story and leaves only the barest of exposition, we do learn that Merriam is not the first officer to be terrorized on the Altair, and these suggestions give the story a sense of circularity, of a haunted tale to be repeated over and over.
Two observer figures make these connections unmistakable. At port, a blind sea-shanty singer plays the accordion, serving as a Greek chorus and bookend structuring device who's ushered numerous new officers on board up the gangplank. At sea, there's a scarred, pallid-faced mute (Skelton Knaggs) who ruminates in quivering voiceovers, vaguely prophesizing what peril awaits. That one figure picks up where the other leaves off and that the two share otherworldly vantage points in combination with their sensory deficiencies becomes a unifying construction for the movie's proceedings, yoking everything under a single overseeing consciousness.
In the end, these are only a few of the many characteristics of the film's wonderfully poetic feeling of ghostliness. And this ghostliness, it eventually becomes clear, emerges out of the uneasy situation of someone holding dominion over others-a power unchecked that takes on supernatural dimensions.